'The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.

http://www.telegraph.co.....html#comment-1623034477

But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.

And they found that nearly 40% of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.

"We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.

“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped."

Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and 140 said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.'

...the 40% figure was a surprise to me as I thought it was closer to 10%. Does anyone have access to the actual study of this published in Resuscitation?? I would prefer reading this from the source as oppose to the journalistic interpretation of it.

This is really interesting. If they hooked these people to EEG, and if there really weren't any brain activity while they had these experiences, data would be even more convincing.

This way, one can offer a counter argument that there maybe still was some kind of brain activity.

I guess one could argue that there could be brain activity beyond the detection limits of current EEG technology. But it would be interesting to read the paper and see how they conducted the study. Interesting stuff though.

cool, thanks bancopuma!

I don't, however, searching for Sam Parnia on http://libgen.org/ yields 13 results, some of which look like they may be the study.

What's the title of the study?

If their consciousness has left the building, then how do they see and hear things?



You hear a couple of beeps timed 3 minutes after clinical death then surely the soundwaves must have been heard through a pair of ears as a beep? If your consciousness was separate from your brain would you hear the noise as beeps or interpret the soundwaves in another way because you don"t have ears or a brain to make the translation?

I would have thought that experiencing things like sight and sound the same way as you would have done in normal everyday reality, while "clinically dead", would lean more towards the brain still having activity.

Link to paper:

http://www.alphagalileo....90110&CultureCode=en

Well this topic is wonderful. Certainly spiritual bodies have always indicated this, summarized by either my entire profile or another term is Saṃsāra (in which there is a pretty cool Netflix documentary called Samsara, the movie is quite a trip!) and hinted at in books such as The Art of Racing in the Rain.

The thing about our current "scientific equipment".. some are trying to base a comprehensive total energetic view of something that we can only define using terms called "life" and "consciousness" using only a specific set of scientific instruments that are calibrated to interpret a set range of frequencies a certain way.. it seems to be too quick to the draw to believe this somehow can 'prove' or that the lack of evidence 'disproves' the life force that is consciousness can exist outside the confines of this human shell. All it does is indicate the data matches the interpretation bound by the confines of the equipment used to interpret it, which don't get me wrong it's good. It's real good. But we all know the only way to really find out.. and I'm okay with waiting, making small talk, making people laugh, building things, and enjoying my time with other people in [God (insert your favorite character here)]'s deli line until my number gets called.

So I pose this question - if we did not have an antenna or speakers to interpret the radio wave that is being transmitted to transmit music... does the music exist... or just the data which is then interpreted and transformed into sound which is then transformed into waves? Or is data by itself meaningless without the correct instrument and interpretation, for it is not music while it is in a wave is it?

hmmm, from a quick look at the paper, seems quite flimsy data to be honest.. There were no experiments done, there is no brain activity data, nothing of the sort.. its all based on interviews/questionnaires given to cardiac arrest survivors... But.... How do we know the memory really came from the time when they were 'away' ? How do we know it wasnt created after? Or even if it did come from the time of cardiac arrest, how do we know there was no brain activity during the cardiac arrest? and if there was brain activity, how significant is it, specially in terms of making assumptions regarding ' life after death' ?

I think thread title is a bit misleading to be honest, and I'd be careful jumping into conclusions before we have better data.

But then again, maybe im missing something, I just did a quick diagonal reading and Im def no expert in the subject.

No you raise valid points, title wise I guess I was going with what the article itself said, which was pretty attention grabbing journalistic hype for sure, it more accurately should have stated "Large study hints that awareness may be maintained in some form for a few minutes after the heart has stopped" but that would attract less readers!

There does need to be more brain activity data to support these conclusions, but hopefully this study will pave the way for new approaches. The thing is though, even EEG and MRI can't detect all activity occurring within deep levels of the brain, they are some of the best tools we have for peering into the brain in a noninvasive fashion but they are still pretty crude. EEG linked up to people's brains experiencing cardiac arrest would be a good start but EEG still does not have the final definitive say on what is actually going on in the brain.

In terms of brain activity, if what people are saying did indeed occur while they were unconscious without blood flow to the brain, it is still intriguing in that one shouldn't really be capable of conscious awareness following cessation of blood flow to the brain, yet a fair potion of people are reporting experiences of conscious awareness involving powers of higher thinking and reasoning which is not what you'd expect based on what we think we know about the brain.

I definitely agree more rigorous work needs to be done, but this is at least a start on something that is pretty darn tricky to study with the scientific method, but hopefully this will pave the way for new approaches.

I think it more plausible that the 'experience' was constructed either during the moments of shutting down consciousness OR during the moments between being dead and fully conscious.

But what would I know... I'm just a realistic killjoy

This could well explain a fair portion of such experiences and NDE's, but all of them, including one's that were verified with events that were going on during clinical death, of which there are numerous? Personally I think that is a bit of a stretch. The science definitely isn't in here, that's for sure.

Study paper is attached for anyone interested.