Consciousness Beyond Life

Pim van Lommel is a world-renowned cardiologist and medical expert on near-death experiences. For more than twenty-five years he worked as a cardiologist at an eight-hundred-bed teaching hospital in the Netherlands where he began studying near-death experiences in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In addition to his sensational study published in the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, van Lommel has authored chapters in several books about near-death experiences and also published many articles about the subject. Over the past several years, van Lommel has been lecturing all over the world on near-death experiences and the relationship between consciousness and brain function. In 2005, he was granted the Bruce Greyson Research Award on behalf of the International Association of Near-Death Studies. In 2006, the president of India awarded him the lifetime achievement award at the World Congress on Clinical and Preventive Cardiology in New Delhi.

As a cardiologist, Pim van Lommel was struck by the number of his patients who claimed to have near-death experiences as a result of their heart attacks. As a scientist, this was difficult for him to accept: Wouldn't it be scientifically irresponsible of him to ignore the evidence of these stories? Faced with this dilemma, van Lommel decided to design a research study to investigate the phenomenon under the controlled environment of a cluster of hospitals with a medically trained staff.