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In 2001, Dutch cardiologists published something strange in The Lancet: 62 of their 344 resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients came back with a story, and years later those 62 feared death measurably less than everyone else on the ward. Federico Faggin, who designed the first microprocessor, thinks numbers like that open a much bigger argument about consciousness.

What 62 cardiac-arrest patients brought back

Federico Faggin designed the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor. Then a spontaneous experience of what he describes as boundless love upended his materialist worldview, and he has spent the decades since studying consciousness. His claim: more than 90 percent of people who go through a near-death experience come out transformed.

The best data we have points the same way, though not to that exact number. A prospective Dutch study of 344 resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients, published in The Lancet in 2001, found that 62 of them (18 percent) reported a near-death experience. At follow-up, those 62 feared death significantly less and believed more strongly in an afterlife than the patients who remembered nothing, and at the eight-year follow-up the change was stronger than it had been at two.

The caveat: not everyone comes back better. A 2025 systematic review of a decade of NDE-aftereffects research in OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying found that positive experiences typically bring increased spirituality, reduced fear of death, and greater compassion. The rarer negative ones can leave confusion, emotional distress, and lasting trauma, and the person's own interpretation strongly shapes which way it goes.

And the famous story that LSD helped Douglas Engelbart invent the computer mouse — retold below — runs into trouble in Computerworld's account of the sessions at Myron Stolaroff's International Foundation for Advanced Study, the Menlo Park nonprofit founded in 1961 where Engelbart first took LSD alongside a group of engineers. By that account, his first low-dose session produced little benefit, his second produced an idea for a potty-training toy for boys, and the article never credits the drug with inspiring the mouse.

— Federico Faggin, physicist and co-inventor of the microprocessor

▶ Third Eye Drops

Sources: computerworld.com · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · journals.sagepub.com

The mouse, the acid, and the missing receipt

Lattin, who has chronicled the early psychedelic movement in several books, says Engelbart took part in the mid-1960s LSD-and-creativity experiments on the San Francisco peninsula and credited insights from those sessions with figuring out the computer mouse. That he took part is well documented. Whether the mouse came out of those sessions is where the paper trail, covered above, comes up short.

— Don Lattin, journalist and psychedelic historian

▶ New Thinking Allowed

How Time magazine learned to love LSD

Mishlove says Gerald Heard, the British philosopher who helped introduce Aldous Huxley to Vedanta, personally turned on Time publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce. If true, it would explain a lot about why Time and Life covered early psychedelic research with unusual warmth while most of the press treated it as a sideshow.

— Jeffrey Mishlove, parapsychology researcher and host of New Thinking Allowed

The monk who gave back his robes

Vades says Robert Thurman spent a short stretch as an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk before returning his robes and continuing as a lay teacher. Thurman has told versions of this himself for years: ordained young, then the householder path. Of this week's batch, it's the easiest claim to check.

— Amy Vades, on Robert Thurman's path

▶ New Thinking Allowed

Fifty years teaching Buddhism in the Ivy League

The same conversation credits Thurman with about 50 years at Columbia University as professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies. His Columbia chair is well documented, though 50 years sounds more like his full academic career than the Columbia chapter alone — a rounded-up number.

— Amy Vades, on Robert Thurman's career

From the Codex: 610 new claims indexed this week · 5,251 attributed claims and counting → explore the Codex

If you've seen a better-documented account of the Engelbart sessions, hit reply — we read everything. And if someone you know still tells the LSD-mouse story at parties, forward them this one.

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