Essay by Eric Worrall
Just in case you thought only climate scientists could produce ridiculous scientific papers.
Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death
Álex Escolà-Gascón 1, Kenneth Drinkwater 2, Andrew Denovan 3, Neil Dagnall 2, Julián Benito-León 4 5 6 7
Received 16 October 2025, Accepted 20 March 2026, Available online 25 March 2026, Version of Record 8 September 2026.
Public summary
- Fisher-Escolà Q coefficient quantifies entanglement-behavior effects with validated thresholds.
- Entanglement increases accurate recall; non-entangled controls remain at chance performance.
- Expectation bias eliminated: entangled groups shared recall distributions, overlap coefficient 0.843.
- Nonlocal perception predicted 32% of near-death experience variance, independent of psychotic symptoms.
- False-memory and hallucination controls isolate entanglement-driven recall in resuscitated patients.
- We deliver clinical guidance on monitoring thresholds, communication, sedation, and post-resuscitation care.
If consciousness can operate under quantum principles, then the boundaries between life, death, and cognition are far more permeable than current science allows. In the first large-scale, randomized, double-blind, multicenter trial to test this possibility, conducted across 13 hospitals in the UK and Spain, we investigated whether the human mind can access information during clinical death—but only when exposed to auditory stimuli governed by quantum entanglement. The entangled stimulation circuit was implemented and synchronized with the 127-qubit IBM Brisbane quantum supercomputer and delivered during in-hospital cardiopulmonary arrest (CA), beginning 120 s after arrest onset. Quantum entanglement was verified through statistically significant violations of Mermin inequalities. During resuscitation, we measured neurophysiological biomarkers including cerebral oxygenation via near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), brain temperature, and blood pH, lactate, and serum concentrations of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). After reanimation, 142 survivors completed a forced-choice recall test, near-death experience (NDE) scales, and other clinical control assessments. False memories, hallucinations, and confounding biases were successfully controlled. Notably, recall lucidity increased momentarily as NIRS values dropped, and NDEs positively correlated with neuroplasticity during CA. Biomarker models explained up to 56.8% of the variance in recall. These findings compel a radical rethinking of clinical death: consciousness may persist—quantum bound, detectable, and not yet defeated.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666675826001025
The authors also take a crack at scientific materialism, which they suggest is too narrow a framework to explain near-death experiences.
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Applied to the study of consciousness, scientific materialism imposes an epistemic framework that often renders NDEs elusive or resistant to explanation. As Greyson45 has argued, the positivist and mechanistic assumptions underpinning mainstream scientific inquiry struggle to accommodate phenomena that appear to defy reductionist modeling. This challenge has prompted a growing number of scholars to call for expanded theoretical paradigms—ones capable of integrating the subjective richness of conscious experience without relinquishing empirical rigor.46 NDEs are frequently cited as exemplars of phenomena that remain inaccessible to existing scientific methods and narratives.28
In fact, as early as the mid-1990s, philosopher and neuroscientist [sic] David Chalmers47 articulated what has become known as the “hard problem of consciousness”—the challenge of explaining how and why subjective experiences arise from physical processes. Although initially unrelated to NDEs, the conceptual obstacles Chalmers identified are directly relevant to this field of inquiry.48 Like the hard problem itself, NDEs force us to confront the limitations of reductive explanations for conscious phenomena.
Read more: Same link as above
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I’m not disparaging anyone’s spiritual beliefs. But when I read that quantum entanglement somehow helped resuscitated patients recall what happened while their hearts were stopped, my first thought was “where is the liquid helium?”.
Quantum computer experiments which attempt to string multiple entanglements together use extreme cold to quieten everything down, to minimise the risk of their fragile quantum entanglement being disturbed by random interactions with the environment. At room temperature atoms are vibrating like crazy and heat and light radiation is flying in all directions. Extreme cold temporarily quietens all this random quantum noise, and gives the carefully controlled quantum entanglements you are interested in a chance to evolve without interference from the environment. Superconducting quantum computers like IBM’s run colder than liquid helium – around a hundredth of a degree above absolute zero, inside a dilution refrigerator.
To be fair, the authors did have the helium – it was in IBM’s quantum computer. Their entanglement was created on IBM’s 127 qubit Brisbane processor. But that is where the entanglement stayed. The moment IBM’s qubits are measured, the entanglement is gone, and what comes out is a string of ordinary classical ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros were then used to select sounds which were played to patients in hospitals in Spain and the UK – at room temperature, through ordinary audio equipment. Nothing quantum ever reached the hospital ward. As far as the patient’s ears are concerned, the sounds may as well have been selected by tossing a coin.
The authors’ own preprint as good as admits this, stating that the stimuli “were assumed to adopt quantum states”.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is even more scathing:
If a robust scientifically reproducible method of communicating with people in the afterlife was discovered, I would be just as surprised and excited as everyone else. I would want to ask philosophically important questions like “Where did you say my Ballarat Gold Rush ancestors buried the treasure Gramps?”. But I very much doubt a method of communicating with people who have crossed over is what we are seeing with this kind of experiment.
