“Able to recall surprising details”

This won’t go on forever, but I’m continuing to extract — and to share — notes from my reading of Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), by the Dutch cardiologist and researcher Pim van Lommel:

When heart patients without an NDE were asked to describe their resuscitation, they always made one or more essential errors, unlike patients who had an NDE during their resuscitation and who were able to recall surprising details of this procedure.  (128)

And it is even harder to find a materialist explanation for perceptions at a considerable distance from the hospital or for verified perceptions by visually handicapped or blind people.  (128)

There’s a reference in this next passage to an article published in The Lancet, which is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal.  Founded in London in 1823, it now has additional offices in New York and Beijing and is generally ranked among the world’s oldest, most prestigious, and best known general medical journals.  The article to which reference is made (and which I recommend) is Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich, “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (December 15, 2001): 2039–2045.

Reports of out-of-body episodes can include verifiable facts that people could not have seen or heard with their normal senses and that doctors and nurses never mentioned afterward.  These reported perceptions usually take place from a position outside and above the body and sometimes even from outside the room where the body lies.  As mentioned, medical and nursing personnel were usually stunned by the level of detail patients knew about their resuscitation and almost always responded with surprise or disbelief.  The story of the dentures that were removed and stored during a resuscitation, which was published in The Lancet and told earlier, is inexplicable to most scientists because the patient knew details about his resuscitation and the appearance and actions of the doctors and nurses in attendance despite entering the hospital in a coma and being transferred to the intensive care unit for respiration while still comatose.

Out-of-body experiences are often difficult to corroborate if the NDEs took place many years ago.  Additional prospective research is needed to verify out-of-body experiences shortly after resuscitation.  But there are so many well-documented cases of people leaving their body, with a great many verifiable details, that it is virtually impossible to cast doubt upon them or to ascribe them to fantasy or imagination.  (128-129)

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Two stories relating to far-distant realms:

“The Search for ET May Be Missing Life on Low-Oxygen Worlds: Microbes thrived on ancient Earth, even with very little of the life-giving gas”

“The Last of the Universe’s Ordinary Matter Has Been Found: For decades, astronomers weren’t able to find all of the atomic matter in the universe. A series of recent papers has revealed where it’s been hiding.”