Resuscitation specialist Sam Parnia continues to darken already murky waters of thanatology, by offering his colleagues to carefully examine stories of people returned from the dead. In his view, which will be fully supported by any competent philosopher, these stories shed light on the nature of human consciousness.
“Consciousness does not disappear at death. There is no such discrete point in time. Death is a process,” he claims.
In the middle of the XX century, with the discovery of methods of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the study of death has entered a new phase. Initially capable of resuscitating a person within few minutes after clinical death, now people who “died” more than half an hour ago can be brought back to life. New technologies developed in the recent years can yield remarkable results when the heart begins to beat after several hours of inactivity.
But let us go back to the subject. Once resuscitation had become a routine procedure, the specialists learned plenty of stories from patients containing strange fact that after death the patients continued to see and hear, although their brain, according to the medical equipment was not functioning. These stories had been told in the past, but because it was impossible to explain these visions based on neuroscience, these stories had been mostly dismissed or preserved until the time when the equipment would become more advanced, and enough knowledge about the human body would be accumulated.
It seems that these times have come: Mr. Parnia is the head of a research project AWARE, which meticulously records stories of resuscitated patients in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe. In his previous interview, Mr. Parnia briefly talked about the phenomenon of human consciousness, and this time he provides a more incisive perspective when recently interviewed for the “Wired” magazine.
First of all, it is worth noting that Mr. Parnia suggests to forget the term “near-death experience” and replace it with a post-mortem experience (after-death experience), because from a medical point of view, cardiac arrest and cessation of blood flow into the brain constitutephysical death. Thus, the strange and unexplained visions experienced by patients occur after death.
Mr. Parnia found that 10% of cardiac arrest survivors recall interesting things after resuscitation. The stories resemble one another in their narrative: the state of tranquility and meeting a perfect being expressing love and compassion. The Hindus claim it is a god in the pantheon already known to them, the Christians make reference to God or Jesus, and the atheists explain it as encountering some abstract entity. Similar descriptions are given even by children three years of age. Many survivors of this experience no longer fear death, assured by the knowledge that their existence is meant to last forever.
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Filed under: Life, Science Tagged: Afterlife, BRAIN, CONSCIOUSNESS, Consciousness Exists Outside the Brain, Death, mind-body connection, near death experiences
