According to Parnia, around 2% of cardiac survivors recall an experience of seeing themselves from above.
According to wikipedia.org, clinical death is the medical term for cessation of blood circulation and breathing, the two necessary criteria to sustain life. This is what you call cardiopulmonary arrest, a period when a person’s heartbeat and breathing stop but can still be revived if early medical attention is given.
On the other hand, brain/biological death occurs four to six minutes after clinical death. This is due to the fact that the heart is the main pumping machine of the body, and without the blood coming from the heart, the brain will gradually cease to function until it achieves irreversible damage.
This is when the doctor will formally or legally declare that the person is dead as the neurological damage to the person is really impossible to reverse.
A person can be clinically dead but can still exist with the help of artificial life support. This is the best time to consider the option of organ donation. Technically, the patient is already dead but the organs are still functioning. Once the life support is taken off, the whole body will start to deteriorate and cease its functions permanently.
Brain death, either of the whole brain or the brain stem, is used as a legal indicator of death in many jurisdictions.
Brain death occurs in one out of every 200 hospital deaths (CDC study, 1986). It is a fairly rare event.
These patients are evaluated for donation, with half being excluded because of other medical problems (cancers, infections, etc.).
Of the half with medically acceptable organs, half of the families refuse donation, resulting in one organ donor out of 800 hospital deaths.
Sometimes, the line between life and death can seem blurred. In one recent case, a woman was erroneously declared dead after having a heart attack and wound up freezing to death in a body bag in the morgue.
Another woman gave birth to a baby three months after she technically died. Then, there was a case of a skier who became submerged under freezing water for hours, but was revived and suffered no brain damage.
Each year, as many as 1 out of 5 people whose hearts stop will be revived. The stories that some of them share are often called near-death experiences, or NDEs.
These incidents often feature tunnels leading to a bright light, spiritual encounters, meetings with deceased loved ones, and other things that seem mystical.
In some cases, people whose hearts have stopped beating describe out-of-body experiences, in which they feel like they’ve left their bodies and seen the efforts to revive them.
“These are anecdotal reports, but there are a large number of them going back decades, and these testimonies suggest that something is going on,” says Parnia.
When the brain stops, blood quickly stops flowing to the brain. Patients are unconscious, and their brains register no activity. They are, says Parnia, clinically dead.
“In the context of cardiac arrest, they are not near death,” says Parnia. “They really have gone biologically beyond death.”
A new study suggests your consciousness carries on functioning after your heart stops beating and your body movements fail.
This means you are essentially “trapped” inside your dead body with your brain still working, if only for a short time.
Survivors of cardiac arrest were aware of what was going on around them while they were “dead” before being “brought back to life”, the study revealed.
More surprising still, there is evidence to suggest the deceased may even hear themselves being pronounced dead by doctors.
Dr Sam Parnia is studying consciousness after death and examining cardiac arrest cases in Europe and the United States.
He says people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness.
The expert ventured that people who have survived cardiac arrest later accurately described what was happening around them after their hearts stopped beating.
He said: “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.”
Explaining when a patient is officially declared dead, he said: “It’s all based on the moment when the heart stops.
“Technically speaking, that’s how you get the time of death.”
His study is examining what happens to the brain after a person goes into cardiac arrest — and whether consciousness continues after death and for how long — to improve the quality of resuscitation and prevent brain injuries while restarting the heart.
Unlike the plot in the film Flatliners, however, when a person is resuscitated they don’t return with a “magical enhancement” of their memories, said Dr Parnia.
Caroline Watt is a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who specialises in examining paranormal accounts with an open but critical mind. She was the co-author of a review paper suggesting that near-death experiences may well be based in neurological activity.
She says one study found about half the patients that reported near-death experiences had not been anywhere near death at all. They had experienced them at times when they were expecting a traumatic experience, such as during childbirth. This perhaps suggests that whatever the sensation is, it isn't a glimpse of the afterlife.
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