Dutch researchers of near-death experiments have collected over 70 cases where people supposedly left their bodies during clinical death and observed scenes that they could not perceive with their senses.
The details of the scenes seen could be checked for reliability (for example, the actions of people in the hospital). These stories can be proof that consciousness can exist outside the brain.
Titus Rivas, Annie Drven, and Rudolph Smith described these incidents in a book called Wat een stervend brein niet kan (What a Dying Brain Can't Do). Here are some excerpts from this book.
Cardiac surgeon Lloyd W. Rudy (1934–2012) reported a patient who was clinically dead for 20 minutes. Then he suddenly came to life. His return to life was incredible in itself, but what he told about the time while he was dead was beyond explainable.
Dr. Rudy graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine. He was part of the first group of heart transplant surgeons at Stanford University. On Christmas Day, Rudy and his assistant, Roberto Amado-Cattaneo, performed surgery to replace infected heart valves. The patient suffered from an aneurysm caused by an infection.
Deciding that the patient's condition was hopeless, the surgeons issued a death certificate, informed his wife of her husband's death, and turned off the machines.
"For some reason, they forgot to turn off the machine that measures the body's indicators," the researchers write. "Before they decided that the patient was hopeless, they lowered a long tube with a microphone to his body in order to have an accurate picture of certain bodily functions, such as the pulse."
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“Rudy and his assistant were dressing up. They both took off their robes, gloves and masks and stood in the doorway. They discussed what could be done to save the patient.
“From the moment the patient was declared dead, it took 20-25 minutes. Suddenly the doctors heard some kind of electrical activity … Rudy and his assistant thought it might be heart cramps, but the activity increased and it became clear that it was a pulse. At first it was slow, then it began to accelerate."
No one performed resuscitation procedures to revive the patient, because he had already been declared dead, it happened spontaneously. It took the patient several days to recover, but he fully recovered without any signs of brain damage.
Amao-Cattaneo says: "I had several cases when patients came to their senses after a long and deep shock, but all these people were alive, and in this case the patient was already dead."
The patient described a bright light at the end of the tunnel and exiting the body, as is often the case in such cases. But besides that, he told the real things that happened in the hospital.
He saw Rudi and Amado-Cattaneo talking, he accurately described their location in the ward, how they stood with their arms crossed over their chest; he saw the anesthesiologist entering the ward. The most interesting thing he saw was the nurse's computer monitor, on which notes were pasted in a row, one sheet was pasted at the top, separately from the others. Indeed, the nurse wrote the phone messages for Rudy on pieces of paper and pasted them in that order.
The authors write: “Rudy pointed out that the patient could not see these notes prior to surgery because there were no missed calls at that time. In addition, the order of the arrangement of these notes was not standard, and the patient could not accidentally guess it."
“Rudy came to the conclusion that the patient really had to be out of his body, because otherwise he could not describe the ward and other things. Coincidence or foresight cannot be a realistic explanation."
Amado-Cattaneo also could not explain what happened. He confirmed that the patient accurately described events that he could not see because his eyes were covered with tape to protect the cornea during surgery.
His vital signs were not broken, his heart stopped and he showed no signs of life for at least 20 minutes. Amado-Cattaneo could not remember the patient's name, and Rudi was already dead when Rivas and his colleagues decided to study the case more closely.
In an article published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Rivas and Smith write of this case: “Of course it would be complete if it was possible to establish an identity to study his medical records. But such an analysis is possible only if Amado-Cattaneo remembers his name, otherwise additional research is not possible. However, in our opinion, this defect only slightly diminishes, but does not negate the importance of this case as a serious evidence of non-physical perception [a term that means perception that is impossible by the senses in view of the state and position of the subject's physical body]."
Rivas and Smith conclude: "We believe that collecting such cases will reduce the denial of this phenomenon."