![]() ![]() Some saw living things: “All plants, no flowers” or “lions and tigers” while others basked in the glow of “a brilliant light” or were reunited with family. Others, however, experienced the opposite sensation, with 22% reporting “a feeling of peace or pleasantness”. “There were four men with me, and whichever lied would die … I saw men in coffins being buried upright.” Another remembered being “dragged through deep water”, and still another was “told I was going to die and the quickest way was to say the last short word I could remember”. “I had to get through a ceremony … and the ceremony was to get burned,” one patient recalled. ![]() There were those who reported feeling afraid or suffering persecution, for example. These mental experiences ranged from terrifying to blissful. “It seems like the mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been assumed in the past.” “Most of these were not consistent to what’s called ‘near-death’ experiences,” Parnia says. Instead, they reported dream-like or hallucinatory scenarios that Parnia and his co-authors categorised into seven major themes. Nearly 50% of the study participants could recall something, but unlike Mr A and just one other woman whose out-of-body account could not be verified externally, the other patients’ experiences did not seem to be tied to actual events that took place during their death. Mr A, it turned out, was not the only patient who had some memory of his death. “And then, if we got people who claimed auditory and visual awareness at the time of death, to see if we are able to determine if they really were aware.” “The goal was to try to understand, first of all, what is the mental and cognitive experience of death?” Parnia says. Of those patients, doctors were able to bring 16% back from the dead, and Parnia and his colleagues were able to interview 101 of them, or about a third. So for four years, they analysed more than 2,000 cardiac arrest events – moments when a patient’s heart stops and they are officially dead. It is possible, they believe, to collect scientific data about those would-be final moments. Doctors mostly dismissed such anecdotal evidence as hallucinations, and researchers have been reluctant to delve into the study of near-death experiences, predominantly because it was viewed as something outside of the reach of scientific exploration.īut Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, along with colleagues from 17 institutions in the US and UK, wanted to do away with assumptions about what people did or did not experience on their deathbeds. ![]() For years, those who have come back from that inscrutable place have often reported memories of the event. At this point, the person is technically dead – although as we learn more about the science of death, we are beginning to understand that, in some cases, the condition can be reversible. Until now, researchers assumed that when the heart ceases to beat and stops sending vital blood to a person’s brain, all awareness immediately ends. Mr A’s story – described in a paper in the journal Resuscitation – is one of a number of reports that challenge accepted wisdom on near-death experiences. He was describing things that happened during a three-minute window of time that, according to what we know about biology, he should not have had any awareness of. Mr A’s descriptions of the people in the room – people he had not seen before he lost consciousness – and their actions were also accurate. Hospital records later verified the AED’s two verbal commands. “The next second, I was up there, looking down at me, the nurse and another man who had a bald head.” “I felt that she knew me, I felt that I could trust her, and I felt she was there for a reason I didn’t know what that was,” Mr A later recalled. He joined her, leaving his inert body behind. ![]() Mr A heard a mechanical voice twice say, “Shock the patient.” In between those orders, he looked up to see a strange woman beckoning to him from the back corner of the room, near the ceiling. The staff grabbed an automated external defibrillator (AED), a shock-delivery machine used to try to reactivate the heart. Mr A died.ĭespite this, he remembers what happened next. With oxygen cut off, his brain immediately flat-lined. Medical personnel were in the middle of inserting a catheter into his groin when he went into cardiac arrest. In 2011, Mr A, a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to Southampton General Hospital after collapsing at work. ![]()
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