On his web site Dr. Pim van Lommel says he “worked as a cardiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital, an 800-bed teaching hospital in Arnhem in the Netherlands, from 1977 to 2003.” After more than twenty years of research, in 2001 van Lommel and his colleagues published in the medical journal The Lancet their Dutch study of near-death experiences. “Over the past several years Pim van Lommel has been lecturing all over the world on near-death experiences and the relationship between consciousness and brain function.”
I suggest from my research that van Lommel’s Consciousness Beyond Life provides the most thorough discussion of NDEs in a scientific book. Chapter titles include: What Happens in the Brain When the Heart Suddenly Stops? What Do We Know About Brain Function? Quantum Physics and Consciousness, The Brain and Consciousness, and Endless Consciousness. In 320 pages van Lommel offers a comprehensive narrative supported by more than 30 pages of endnotes. I refer extensively to this book in my writing about NDEs, but in my blog include a few of the arguments presented in this comprehensive study.
Van Lommel begins Consciousness Beyond Life with a quote written early in the 20th-century by Frederick van Eeden, a Dutch psychiatrist: “All science is empirical science, all theory is subordinate to perception; a single fact can overturn an entire system.” Then van Lommel relates his personal experience as a young cardiologist.
“It is 1969. At the coronary care unit the alarm goes off. The monitor shows that the electrocardiogram of a patient with a myocardial infarction (heart attack) has flat lined. The man has suffered a cardiac arrest. Two nurses hurry over to the patient, who is no longer responsive, and quickly draw the curtains around his bed. One of the nurses starts CPR while the other places a mask over his mouth and administers oxygen. A third nurse rushes over with the resuscitation trolley that contains the defibrillator. The defibrillator is charged, the paddles are covered in gel, the patient’s chest is bared, the medical staff let go of the patient and the bed, and the patient is defibrillated. He receives an electric shock to the chest. It has no effect. Heart massage and artificial respiration are resumed, and, in consultation with the doctor, extra medication is injected into the IV drip. Then the patient is defibrillated for the second time. This time his cardiac rhythm is reestablished, and after a spell of unconsciousness that lasted about four minutes, the patient regains consciousness, to the great relief of the nursing staff and the attendant doctor.
“I was the attending doctor. I had started my cardiology training that year. Following the successful resuscitation, everybody was pleased—everybody except the patient. He had been successfully revived, yet to everybody’s surprise he was extremely disappointed. He spoke of a tunnel, colors, a light, a beautiful landscape, and music. He was extremely emotional. The term near-death experience (NDE) did not yet exist, and I had never heard of people remembering the period of their cardiac arrest.
“While studying for my degree, I had learned that such a thing is in fact impossible: being unconscious means being unaware—and the same applies to people suffering a cardiac arrest or patients in a coma. At such a moment it is simply impossible to be conscious or to have memories because all brain function has ceased. In the event of a cardiac arrest, a patient is unconscious, is no longer breathing, and has no palpable pulse or blood pressure.”
Pim van Lommel, www.pimvanlommel.nl/Pim_van_lommel_eng.
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