The most recent instalment of the always-fascinating Skeptiko podcast features an interview with Dr. Pim van Lommel (audio podcast and text transcription), well-known researcher of the near-death experience. Van Lommel is best known as the lead author of an NDE study published in 2001 in the premiere medical journal The Lancet:
I was raised and also in the study of medicine years and years ago, I accepted everything, that there is one kind of science and it was materialistic science. I just accepted the fact that everybody thought that consciousness was a product of a functioning brain. It was because in ‘86, after reading the book by George Ritchie, The Return From Tomorrow, about a near-death experience he experienced as a medical student in 1943, I was so curious. I had only heard of it once before in ‘69.
I started to ask my patients who survived cardiac arrest if they could remember something of the period of unconsciousness. To my big surprise, within two years out of 50 patients asked, 12 of them told me about their NDEs. And it was for me the start because it was my scientific curiosity, how it could be explained that people can have an enhanced consciousness when they are unconscious, when the heart doesn’t work and there is no breathing and their brain stops functioning.
That’s the reason we started the study and that’s also when I had so many patients telling me about an enhanced consciousness also with the possibility of perception out and above the body that I had to change all my concepts.
More recently van Lommel has written a best-selling book about the near-death experience, Endless Consciousness, which has recently been translated into English as Consciousness Beyond Life (Amazon US and UK).
Previously on TDG:
