After you die, do you know your dead? One new study suggests that you do.
Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone School of Medicine in New York City; he recently conducted one of the largest studies of its kind. The study’s purpose was to determine if consciousness continued after death.
Dr. Parnia and his team are (and have been) observing people who have suffered from cardiac arrest, technically died, but then were later revived. Some of the people that were studied claim that they can fully recall conversations happening around them after being pronounced dead.
People who had technically died recounted conversations that the nurses and doctors had after the time of death. The nurses verified the claims and were stunned.
“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them,” he explained.
What is death? From a medical standpoint, death is defined as the time at which the heart stops beating. This moment cuts off blood flow to the brain and a person is medically dead.
“Technically, that’s how you get the time of death – it’s all based on the moment when the heart stops. Once that happens, blood no longer circulates to the brain, which means brain function halts almost instantaneously,” Dr. Parnia explained to Live Science. “You lose all your brain stem reflexes – your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone.”
Now, however, scientists are discovering that there is a “hyper-alerted state” in the brain for a brief period after clinical death.
In 2013, a study was done at the University of Michigan in which they analyzed the brain signals in nine anesthetized rats. They saw excitable brain activity in the moments after an induced cardiac arrest.
“In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of ‘love’, for instance, we’re trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we’re all going to have when we die,” Dr. Parnia says.
“At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death, to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you’ve died for some period of time — and how that relates to what’s happening inside the brain in real time,” Parnia said.
So, what do you think? Are these new findings scary or fascinating? Dr. Parnia talks about the science of death in the interview with Dr. Oz below.
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