How can people brought back from death after cardiac arrest report having experienced lucid and vivid memories and recollections without a functioning brain? The study of near-death experiences is …
He could see a nurse and doctor, a bald, “chunky fella” dressed in blue hospital scrubs. He watched as they frantically worked on his body, which was remarkable, considering he was, essentially, dead.
Dr. Sam Parnia estimates the man experienced conscious awareness for three to five minutes in the absence of detectable brain activity, a time, he has said, “when no human experience should be happening whatsoever.” Parnia isn’t a religious man. He insists he isn’t after proof of the existence of an afterlife, or a supernatural hereafter. Rather, he and others are trying to find better ways to save the brain and avoid horrific “disorders of consciousness” like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who entered a permanent vegetative state after her brain was starved of oxygen.
But a tidy flip side, Parnia says, is that “we can also study what happens to human mind and consciousness after people go beyond the threshold of death.” More people are being successfully revived after “crashing” in a hospital, and Parnia believes even more lives could be saved, more people hauled back across that threshold of death, if more hospitals implemented more advanced techniques — chilling bodies to protect the brain, or using automated mechanical devices to deliver chest compressions beyond what any human could do.
The stories of “experiencers” share strikingly similar features: a sensation of feeling peaceful and joyous and an absence of pain; a warm, welcoming light that draws people, sometimes through a tunnel; being greeted by apparitions of deceased relatives, or a “being of light,” a panoramic review of key moments of one’s life.
“If you look down a microscope at a brain cell, and I said to you, this brain cell is now thinking, you’d say that’s crazy, it’s a brain cell.” Brain cells produce proteins that generate changes in sodium, which generates electricity. “That’s not a thought,” Parnia says. The phenomenon has been described worldwide, from Japan, India, the Middle East and the Americas. They’re remarkably consistent across cultures and religions, and have been reported by children as young as preschoolers. Parnia once interviewed a three-year-old boy who survived a cardiac arrest after an epileptic seizure. “When I died, I saw a bright lamp,” the boy told Parnia during a play session. “Grandma came to meet me and said I was going to be okay.
In fact, McGill University doctors reported last year the case of a 38-year-old man who appeared to regain consciousness several times during CPR. The man was defibrillated six times. Throughout the ordeal he made “purposeful movements to push CPR providers away” and verbalized with each jolt of the defibrillator, Dr. Roger Gray reported in the journal Canadian Family Physician. When signs of consciousness were recognized, CPR was immediately halted, and his pulse checked.
More astonishing, researchers at the University of Western Ontario reported two years ago the case of a patient who was taken off life support who continued to show bursts of brain wave activity for up to 10 minutes after the final heartbeat. This isn’t the “locked-in” syndrome, where people are conscious and can think and reason but unable to speak or move. Or people in a “vegetative” state because of a severe brain injury. People who report near-death experiences describe their consciousness separating out, withdrawing from their bodies. Says Parnia: “They’re watching it, they can see it happening to them, but they’re not in pain and they’re wondering why everyone is worrying about them.
Even fleeting bursts of electrical activity deep in the brain’s temporal lobe, even a few seconds worth, can evoke experiences of the paranormal and mystical. Last August, a team from Imperial College London reported that the psychedelic drug DMT mimics near-death experiences in the brain. Thirteen volunteers given intravenous DMT completed the Greyson scale — that standardized questionnaire that tries to quantify near-death experiences. They all scored above the threshold for an NDE. Dr.
That’s certainly what the people putting up US$10,000 to have their brains cryogenically frozen or “vitrified” are banking on. One Silicon Valley start ups claim to be developing technology that can preserve not just the physical brain, but also the memories within it, with the goal to one day upload those frozen memories into a server so people can live a new life as a computer simulation, perhaps a robot.
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