To this day, we cannot really explain consciousness. The philosopher David Chalmers calls it the „hard problem of consciousness”, 1996).

The hard problem is why and how a physical objective process (i.e. what the brain does) can trigger a certain subjective experience (i.e. how we experience the world). We can measure all kinds of things in the brain, for example where our attention goes or where different sensory impressions are collected. But how does our individual experience or even our “I” come about?

Of course, this is based on the assumption that our consciousness is the result of neuronal activity in our brain. In other words, this cluster of cells in our brain produces everything we call consciousness: how we process a car accident or the separation from a loved one; how we perceive the sun on our skin; or when we have an idea that we are so enthusiastic about that we want to implement it immediately. Somehow, our brain does it all.

Anyone who says otherwise is either just not thinking "scientifically enough”, is naively religious or, in the worst case, is an extremely drifted esoteric crank. But what if impulses come from science itself that call this materialistic view of the world into question? What if there is scientific evidence that our dominant idea of a purely brain-made consciousness is wrong or should be reconsidered?

So this blog article is going to be scientific: I have picked out three areas of research that I personally find totally exciting and that could well turn our image of consciousness on its head.

Endless consciousness in near-death experiences

Pim van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who was the first to really systematically try to find a scientific explanation for so-called near-death experiences: the phenomenon during which, patients describe having once been dead and returned to life after a cardiac arrest or car accident, and actually remember their period of being dead consciously. Survivors often describe such an experience in a similar way - for example, that they were able to see themselves from above as if they had left their body. That they experienced a kind of “expanded consciousness” with positive feelings of peace or universal love, “even though” they were aware that they were dead.

Van Lommel systematically surveyed patients who required emergency resuscitation in several hospitals over a number of years and in several methodologically well-designed studies. He has published his results, for example, here (Van Lommel, 2013), here (Van Lommel, 2011),  and here (Van Lommel et al., 2001) . His study, published in the Lancet in 2001, attracted worldwide attention.

If you don't want to work your way through the scientific studies, I recommend his book Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (German title: "Endloses Bewusstsein"; Van Lommel, 2014) in which he has summarized his findings in a way that is easy for laypeople to understand.

But what did he find out?

• After several decades of research, van Lommel has come to the conclusion that near-death experiences cannot be reduced to pure imagination, nor can they be explained by fear of death, hallucinations, psychoses, religious beliefs, the intake of medication or a lack of oxygen in the brain. In fact, in decades of systematic research, he has not been able to find a single medical, psychological or even pharmacological explanation. He therefore concludes that these experiences must be authentic. And he reports that patients are usually completely changed afterwards.   
• For example, survivors with a near-death experience still even 8 years after their experience report feeling more understanding and acceptance for others, more loving and empathetic, less fearful of death, more appreciation for the everyday things in life and a greater interest in spirituality compared to those without such an experience. However, they also report feelings of loneliness and isolation, as they are unable to explain what they have experienced to those around them. They mention that those around them do not cope so well with the fact that they have changed. And they talk about the fear of being ridiculed.
• It was also striking that after 2 and after 8 years patients were still able to describe their experience as detailed and vividly as immediately after the experience, something that is absolutely not usual with a dream or an invented story.
• What is also particularly exciting are his reports of cases in which patients, during the phase in which they were proven to be clinically dead, were able to see things from above (as they had “left” their bodies) or overhear conversations that they could neither have seen nor heard from their lying position in their human bodies. However, they were able to report on these things afterwards.

Van Lommel certainly wasn't the first and only person to study near-death experiences, but he was probably the first to date to look at the phenomenon in such a systematic, comprehensive and methodologically correct way that his findings cannot simply be ignored. Above all, he conducted prospective studies: in other words, he did not simply search for and interview those affected retrospectively. No, he devised a protocol beforehand for examining and interviewing all patients who would experience a cardiac arrest in the future and thus possibly also an out-of-body experience. Thus, he was also able to determine how often this occurs in cardiac arrest survivors. In his Lancet study, for example, it was 18%.

Could we all be like Professor X in X-Men? Evidence from parapsychology

Wabbeh et al (2022) argue in this summarizing study that theories based on a so-called non-local consciousness should be given a chance.

That's why I like it so much! By non-local, they mean that consciousness doesn't actually have to be bound to one place, namely the brain, that it could even be independent of space-time. This is very similar to the conclusion reached by van Lommel.

Because yes, these theories do exist, even if they are more of a fringe area. At the moment, so-called physicalist theories prevail, which assume that our consciousness is the result of neuronal activity in the brain. However, they have not yet been able to explain consciousness - and how it comes about - properly. And there are phenomena that cannot be explained with the help of these theories either - if these phenomena are taken seriously at all. They are often dismissed as “anomalies” or “measurement errors”, or simply as fraud.

As one of the examples, the authors cite the extensive, perfectly serious research into so-called parapsychological or “psi” phenomena - i.e. everything that we have relegated to the realm of myths and legends, such as telepathy (the transmission of thoughts or perceptions, images or similar to another person), remote viewing (the remote perception of things that happen in another place) or precognition (knowing that something will happen before it happens).

Even if there is of course a lot of criticism and skepticism here and the research is not unambiguous, there is certainly serious evidence. And many of the results could only be explained by non-local theories of consciousness. Social psychologist Daryl Bem, for example, finds evidence of increased telepathic abilities in people who would be described as “more creative” or in people who actively and regularly meditate (Bem, 1996).

In another meta-analysis summarizing 90 experiments on precognition, he also found robust effects (Bem et al., 2016). Tressoldi comes to a similar conclusion with his meta-analysis of more than 200 individual studies (2011). Are they all scammers now? Opinions are divided. Tressoldi himself argues that the evidence should at least be sufficient to support the assumption that the human mind could possess “quantum properties”. This would speak in favor of a non-local consciousness.

What I also like is that the authors see the non-local theories as complementary to the physicalist theories, i.e. they do not want to replace the latter. Because they argue that even if it turns out that our consciousness is non-local, i.e. exists independently of the body and beyond death, we would still have to explain how exactly non-physical consciousness is “translated” into physical experience - and for that we would still need the physicalist theories.

The burden of proof, i.e. the standard by which evidence for the non-locality of consciousness, as in the case of psi phenomena, is demanded, is extremely high. This is understandable because we are talking about a completely new way of looking at reality. But some scientists have rightly asked, when will enough be enough (Schwartz, 2013). Schwartz argues that many psychological and other recognized scientific phenomena (e.g. the Higgs boson) are based on much less clear evidence than psi phenomena. So when, he asks, is there enough evidence that we can at least say, okay, we obviously can't quite excludethe possibility that consciousness exists independently of the body and beyond death. I think that would be a start.

Quantum properties of consciousness in systemic family constellation work?

Finally, it gets theoretical again, but no less exciting. The fact that quantum physics is used from time to time to try to explain spiritual, occult or esoteric concepts - sometimes more, sometimes less convincingly - is not exactly new. But it's quite a different thing altogether to see a really intelligent, albeit (still) speculative guest article by Dan Cohen from “Seeing with your Heart”, a highly esteemed constellation colleague, in the scientific journal „Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology“ (Cohen, 2023) .

Here, Cohen describes the non-locality of consciousness in constellation work - brilliant, in my opinion, because we constellation practitioners are directly confronted with this non-locality every time in our practical work: Why, for example, is it possible for representatives to make exact and correct statements about people and events unknown to them? How can it be that experiences and traumas are still effective generations later and are “carried” by people who had never heard of these experiences and traumas before the constellation day? But which turn out to be correct and verifiable? The theory of a purely local consciousness cannot explain this.

So why is Dan Cohen publishing his ideas in a biological journal? We have not yet been able to explain constellation work scientifically either. In this work, however, we often see how traumas in family systems are transmitted over many generations. This could perhaps be explained using approaches from a quantum theory of consciousness, as developed by Zhi & Xiu (2023) in the scientific „Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics“ . 

In recent years, quite a body of evidence for quantum properties in biology has been gathered - and Cohen finds possible - albeit speculative - explanations here. This is as mind-blowing as it is difficult to understand. And I think we are still at the very beginning of this kind of research.

But I am also convinced that if we could manage to overcome our own psychological barriers, if we could manage to open up to the idea that consciousness could be more than a few electrical signals in the brain - we could make a quantum leap in our human consciousness development.

For people who have had a near-death experience, the idea of a non-local consciousness that exists beyond death is already a reality. Just as it is for numerous mystics, spiritual seekers, religious believers and meditation practitioners from all cultures worldwide. So why should it be so far-fetched?

References

Bem, D. J. (1996). Ganzfeld phenomena. In G. Stein (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the paranormal (pp. 291-296). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Bem, D., Tressoldi, P., Rabeyron, T., & Duggan, M. (2016). Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events. F1000Research, 4, 1188.

Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York.

Cohen, D. (2023). Family Constellation therapy: A nascent approach for working with non-local consciousness in a therapeutic container. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 186, 33-38.

Schwartz, S. A. (2013). Crossing the threshold: nonlocal consciousness and the burden of proof. EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing, 9(2), 77-81.

Tressoldi, P. E. (2011). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: The case of non-local perception, a classical and Bayesian review of evidences. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 117.

van Lommel, P. (2014). Endloses Bewusstsein: Neue medizinische Fakten zur Nahtoderfahrung. Patmos Verlag.

van Lommel, P. (2013). Non-local consciousness a concept based on scientific research on near-death experiences during cardiac arrest. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20(1-2), 7-48.

van Lommel, P. (2011). Near‐death experiences: the experience of the self as real and not as an illusion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1234(1), 19-28.

van Lommel P, van Wees R, Meyers V, Elfferich I (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. Lancet, 358, 2039-2045.

Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 955594.

Zhi, G., & Xiu, R. (2023). Quantum theory of consciousness. Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics, 11(9), 2652-2670.