Professor’s radical theory claims consciousness doesn’t come from the brain and may continue after death |
If you ask a neuroscientist what happens to your mind when you die, the usual answer is blunt: your brain shuts down, and with it your thoughts, memories and sense of self. Consciousness, in that view, is something the brain does, like the liver processing toxins or the heart pumping blood. When the organ stops, the experience ends. Professor Maria Strømme is suggesting something far stranger. In a new theoretical model, she argues that consciousness does not arise from the brain at all. Instead, it comes first. The brain, along with space, time and matter, comes later. If she’s right, then “what happens when we die” might be less like a light switching off and more like a wave sinking back into the ocean it came from.
Who is Maria Strømme, and what is she actually claiming?
Strømme is not a fringe mystic. She is Professor of Materials Science at Uppsala University and a leading nanotechnology researcher. In the latest issue of the physics journal AIP Advances, she steps wildly outside her usual remit to publish a dense, mathematical paper that was selected as the best of the issue and featured on the cover. In it, she presents “a framework in which consciousness is not viewed as a byproduct of brain activity, but as a fundamental field underlying everything we experience – matter, space, time, and life itself.”Speaking to MailOnline, she explained: “The possibility that consciousness is fundamental has been under–explored. But that is changing rapidly. We are reaching a point where asking deeper questions about consciousness is not philosophy on the margins, it is becoming a scientific necessity.” Strømme is picking up threads from some of the giants of 20th–century physics. She explicitly references Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Planck, all of whom, in different ways, wrestled with the idea that mind and matter might be more entangled than classical science allowed. For years, she says, she has been working on “a quantum-mechanical model that unites quantum physics with non-dual philosophy”. Her starting point is radical but simple: consciousness is fundamental; only thereafter do time, space and matter arise.
Consciousness as an ocean, minds as waves
In standard physics, fields come first. Particles and forces are understood as excitations of underlying fields, ripples that appear when something vibrates. Strømme’s move is to say that the most fundamental field of all might be consciousness itself. “In the model, individual consciousness is understood as a localised excitation or configuration within a universal consciousness field, much like a wave on the surface of an ocean,” she told the Daily Mail. “A wave has a form that is temporary, but the water that carries it does not vanish when the wave subsides.” On this picture, your sense of “me” is a particular pattern in that field. The brain is still important, but not as the source of awareness. Instead, it is more like a receiver, interface or filtering device that shapes and constrains how the underlying field shows up in your experience. “The fundamental substrate of awareness does not begin or end with the body, just as the ocean does not begin or end with the appearance of a single wave,” Strømme says. This is also where death enters the story. If consciousness is primary and the brain is a temporary configuration, then dying would not annihilate awareness in an absolute sense. According to her model, “our individual consciousness does not cease at death, but returns to the universal field of consciousness from which it once emerged.” That doesn’t automatically give you heaven, reincarnation or meeting your relatives in a white tunnel. What it does say is that the field itself, the “ocean,” persists, and the individual “wave” loses its separate form.
Near-death experiences, telepathy and other “mysteries”
The moment you say consciousness is fundamental, you open the door to a lot of topics normally filed under “pseudoscience” or “weird Twitter”. Strømme doesn’t shy away from that. One of her motivations is precisely to see whether some long–standing anomalies can be absorbed into a physics–style model instead of being ignored. “In this model, phenomena that are now perceived as ‘mysterious’ – such as telepathy or near-death experiences – can be explained as natural consequences of a shared field of consciousness,” she says. According to her, near-death experiences (NDEs) are a good example. People on operating tables or after cardiac arrest often report vivid, structured experiences: travelling through tunnels, seeing deceased relatives, encountering religious figures, or observing events in the room from an odd vantage point. Mainstream explanations point to oxygen deprivation, disinhibited brain networks and cultural expectations. Strømme doesn’t dismiss any of that, but she adds another layer. “If individual awareness is not generated only by the brain, but is an expression of a deeper field, as my model suggests, then moments when the brain is impaired could allow atypical access to that underlying field,” she says. In other words, when the normal filtering function of the brain is disrupted, through trauma, anaesthesia or approaching death, you might temporarily “tune in” to aspects of the field that are usually blocked. She extends the same logic to telepathy-like reports. If all individual consciousnesses are patterns in a single field, then in principle information could travel within that field between apparently separate minds. “This would explain why telepathy–like phenomena appear across cultures and throughout history, even though the empirical evidence so far is controversial and not yet conclusive,” Strømme argues. Her claim is not that such abilities are proven, but that if they exist, a universal consciousness field would give them a plausible home.
Consciousness, physics, and an old idea coming back into science
Rather than treating consciousness as a vague metaphysical notion, Strømme argues that it should be built directly into the scientific description of reality. She is explicit that her goal is not poetic speculation, but a mathematically grounded model. As she puts it, “My ambition has been to describe this using the language of physics and mathematical tools. ”Her work and builds upon earlier lines of thought pursued by theoretical giants like Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck, who also considered that consciousness might not be derivative, but fundamental. The idea is not that ancient philosophies were empirically correct, but that they converged intuitively on something modern physics is now circling back to. Strømme herself points to those traditions quite openly. “The texts of the major religions, such as the Bible, the Koran, and the Vedas, often describe an interconnected consciousness,” she notes. “Those who wrote them used metaphorical language to express insights about the nature of reality. Early quantum physicists, in turn, arrived at similar ideas using scientific methods. Now, it is time for hardcore science – that is, modern natural science, to seriously begin exploring this.” In that sense, her model is an attempt to reconcile three strands: ancient philosophical intuition, 20th-century quantum weirdness and 21st-century mathematical physics.
Can any of this be tested or is it just elegant speculation?
For all its metaphysical ambition, Strømme is careful to present her proposal as a scientific model, not a spiritual manifesto. The AIP Advances paper includes what she describes as “testable predictions within physics, neuroscience and cosmology”.Strømme isn’t claiming that telepathy or near-death visions have been proven real, only that some dismissed experiences might deserve a second look with better tools. Instead of treating them as superstition or “woo,” she suggests that modern science could revisit them with strict, transparent experiments. As she puts it, “many phenomena dismissed as pseudoscience could be part of the scientific model and deserve renewed, rigorous scientific testing.”On the physics side, she believes that if consciousness does shape reality at a fundamental level, there might be measurable effects, small deviations in cosmic background signals, or unexpected patterns in quantum experiments. If the evidence shows up, the theory survives. If not, it collapses. That’s how science is supposed to work.Crucially, most of the scientific establishment is not on board yet, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. Neuroscience has decades of strong data showing that thoughts, emotions and awareness correlate closely with brain activity. Many philosophers still argue that moving consciousness “outside the skull” doesn’t explain anything, it just avoids the question.Even Strømme acknowledges that what she is offering is the start of a “paradigm shift”, not the final word. “Are these phenomena really mystical?” she asks. “Or is it simply that there is a discovery we have not yet made, and when we do it will lead to a paradigm shift?”Instead of telling people what to believe, her theory asks a more modest question: what if the brain isn’t the source of consciousness, but rather the receiver? And if that turns out to be true, even partly true, then our understanding of life, death and awareness will have to expand dramatically.
So what happens when we die, then?
On this model, the honest answer is still: we don’t know in concrete, experiential terms. Strømme’s theory doesn’t sketch out detailed afterlives, moral judgements or cosmic justice. It doesn’t tell you whether you will meet your grandparents again, or whether your memories survive. What it does say is that if consciousness is fundamental and field-like, then the end of biological life may not be the end of consciousness in an absolute sense. The “wave” subsides, but the “water” remains. Our individual awareness, as she puts it, “returns to the universal field of consciousness from which it once emerged.” For some, that idea will feel comforting. For others, it will sound like a clever metaphor stretched too far. Either way, Strømme has given the oldest human question, what happens when we die, and what is this awareness that asks the question, a new foothold inside physics rather than outside it. Whether her model survives rigorous testing or not, it pushes the scientific conversation somewhere uncomfortable and intriguing: treating consciousness not as an embarrassing byproduct of brain chemistry, but as a serious piece of the universe that our equations have so far left out.
