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This article has been updated to provide more resources for the reader to further their research in to Near Death Experiences, if interested.

Researchers at the University of Southampton spent four years studying more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrest. They gathered data from 15 different hospitals from the UK, US, and Austria. The study was conducted in 2014.

They found that nearly 40 percent of people who survived described some type of ‘awareness’ during the time they were pronounced clinically dead, before their hearts were restarted.

One remarkable story came from a 57 year old man who, despite being unconsciousness and dead, recalled watching the entire process of his resuscitation.

According to the authors, in a press release by the University of Southampton, "The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice."

Dr. Sam Parnia, the lead author of the study who is now a professor of Medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center explains,

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating, 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. The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for. He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened."

He goes on to explain the significance,

"This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with ‘real’ events when the heart isn’t beating.”  

Many people describe very specific details of what happened to them during cardiac arrest. They describe conversations people had, clothes people wore, events that went on 10 or 20 minutes into resuscitation, where certain people are located in a room for example and what they are doing. This is not compatible with brain activity.

It may be that some people receive better-quality resuscitation, and that, though there's no evidence to support it, they did have brain activity. Or it could indicate that human consciousness, the psyche, the soul, the self, continued to function.

"When you die, there's no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can't have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there's somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn't working."

- Dr Sam Parnia

Of approximately 2000 cardiac arrest patients, a staggering 330 survived and 140 experienced some type of awareness during the time they were clinically dead and being resuscitated. Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best. These experiences warrant further investigation.

Parnia explains,

"These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don't go on after death. There may be something in the brain we haven't discovered that accounts for consciousness, or it may be that consciousness is a separate entity from the brain...All we can say now is that the data suggests that consciousness is not annihilated."

The evidence of some type of awareness or consciousness existing separate from the body is actually quite compelling. When I write about NDE research, I'm often reminded of remote viewing, especially in the case of the 57 year old man mentioned above who described watching his resuscitation.

Remote viewing is the ability to describe a remote geographical location, in detail, regardless of one’s present location and proximity to the place or object that they are describing. The phenomenon is indeed real, so real that it was used by the U.S. intelligence community to “spy” on others, albeit in a psychic manner. You can learn a bit more about it here if interested.

Learning More About NDE Research, Some Resources For You

If NDE research interests you, you can also look at the work of Dr. Bruce Greyson, who is formerly the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies.

In March of 2021, Dr. Greyson published his much anticipated book, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. The book challenges our everyday ideas about our how minds and our brains interact, and offers key insights on how we can begin to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

In 2009, Dr. Greyson co-authored The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation. This book is written by a team of experts who presents the history, recent developments, and controversies in the study of near-death experiences.

I thought the video below would be an appropriate end for this article for those who are interested. It’s a video of Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard trained brain neurosurgeon for more than two decades. He is also the author of the best‐selling book “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.” In the book he looks at the past two and a half years of his life spent in trying to reconcile his rich spiritual experience with contemporary physics and cosmology. He is convinced that his spiritual experience is totally consistent with the leading edges of scientific understanding today.

Dr. Alexander never believed in the existence of an after life, or the soul. That all changed when he was in a coma for seven days caused by severe bacterial meningitis and claims to have had a memorable journey into the after life. Are all of these legitimate experiences and proof of something more, or are they simply just hallucinations created by our own biology?

A couple of quotes from the lecture:

“There are a lot of scientists around the world who realize that when you start getting into the mystery of consciousness, which in essence is the only thing anyone of us truly knows exists, and trying to see exactly what consciousness is, it’s kind of like asking a fish what it’s like in the water. We are so close to it that there’s no way to really separate it out. I assure you that the only thing you’ve ever really known is your own consciousness.”

“We believe that there is this external world out there, the material realm. That’s the realm that materialist science will try to tell you is the thing that exists, but it’s really right at the heart of the deep enigma of quantum mechanics, that our modern society has wrestled with for more than a century now trying to understand. Basically what the results of those experiments have been screaming, is that consciousness is primary and fundamental in this universe, and that is a very important thing to understand.” 

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