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Research into 'near-death' experiences reveals awareness may continue even after the brain has shut
buddha111
New
A large-scale study involving 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, USA and Austria has found that patients experience real events for up to a three-minute period after their heart has stopped beating.
This is the article huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/08/life-after-death-study_n_5950582.html
What is your view on this finding?Does this means our consciousness is separated from our physical body?
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Comments
The heart can stop beating for a couple of minutes, and the brain (suffering greatly) will limp along until some critical exhaustion of oxygen et al shuts it off completely.
But how is experience measured, or verified, in the absence of brain activity?
I'm a nurse, and 'brain death' or shutdown is pretty final, the brain dies quickly and once it shuts down, can't come back. If the damage is sufficient to 'shut it down', there's no return of brain function in any capacity to support consciousness. The evidence for this is in the EEG. Those final days and tests before a person is pronounced clinically dead (loss of heart rate is not considered clinical death), various tests are performed, including perfusion scans of the brain, that map blood circulation, and of course EEG.
Unless it is something other than the brain creating 'consciousness' after clinical death, it just isn't possible. It is a complete logical AND actual failure. The tools we have to note the lack of brain activity can't note post brain function 'activity'.
That doesn't prevent me from being open minded about 'consciousness' or some kind of 'experience' after the brain dies, but it does prevent me from taking claims like this seriously. How in the world can they know? They can't.
The NDE's you hear about occur in the moments before the brain is too damaged to function, and most knowledgeable people understand that the nature of these experiences MAY be due to the activity of a distressed or dying brain before it is rescued. Even that doesn't convince me these experiences are just gasping neurons, think of the experiences of those who use ayahuasca or LSD, their brains aren't dying, but their experiences are certainly altered!
"One man in particular, a 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, was reported to have given a “very credible” account of what was happening in the room during the three minutes that he was "clinically dead".
The man could describe the movements of the doctors and nurses in the room with uncanny accuracy. He told the researchers he felt he was standing in the corner of the room, observing the medical staff resuscitate him".
Just a couple of questions
Because being conscious tends to be associated with the sense doors and the data being received, who or what is it that experiences the 'out of body' experience ?
If 'our' consciousness is separate from our physical body....What sees/senses objects or hears/senses sounds ?
I'm reading Consciousness Beyond Life, written by a Dutch cardiologist who organized his own studies after he encountered more and more heart surgery patients who reported NDE's to him. At first he didn't think anything of them, but eventually, there were too many to ignore.
He researched scientific theories about consciousness being non-local, i.e. not confined to the mind or body. His theory of NDE's now is that memory and consciousness are part of a field phenomenon generated by the electrical activity of the brain. As the brain generates an electro-magnetic field, consciousness exists within that field, which extends beyond the brain, just like the human (and animal) EM field extends well beyond the body. (This can now be measured with EEG machines.)
He also concludes that the brain doesn't generate consciousness. Rather, it functions as a transceiver, receiving consciousness from the environment like a radio receives radio waves. If consciousness is part of a greater field phenomenon that permeates the universe, an individual's consciousness after death could become one with that field.
I'm only just past 1/2-way through the book, and the first half is a discussion of his experience with his patients, the study he devised, and other studies, like the one in the OP. So I can't connect all the dots yet, I've just begun the science-of-consciousness part. But I can report more as I go along.
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Excellent timing for your thread, @buddha111!
Here's more on the study in the OP: a report by the research team itself.
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2014/oct/14_181.shtml
This is a good question, especially in view of the fact that blind patients report being able to see during their NDE's. :hair: . What is it that does the "seeing" when we're asleep and dreaming?
The mind's eye perhaps ? . :om: ..
More research is needed.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm
We have a much more mature understanding of how consciousness arises during child development (reincarceration is the least credible explanation)
Hopefully death studies will become an acceptable and verifiable medical knowledge base.
Yes, of course. But what is that, exactly? When we're awake, we can call it "imagination". It's a willful act. But how does it work when we're asleep?
There's no rest for the wicked ,
.. I guess along similar lines it would create the dreamworld ....
resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572%2814%2900739-4/fulltext
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uhRhtFFhNzQ
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yIu4ESYUdsk
Further informations that I find useful.
Great thread, OP. :thumbsup: .
misguiding title though...
How do you figure?
@Dakini, because the article title mentions awareness after the heart stops beating, not after the brain shuts down. The two assessments of 'death' are different. I would request someone corrects me if I'm wrong, but I think BOTH need to happen irreversibly before a person can be declared officially dead (Brain AND heart shut down completely).
The fact that we are aware is the one thing we cannot deny.
Part of my Meditation practice is to work at getting in touch with my own pure, untainted awareness that is not scarred by physical experience - just being aware of the fact that I'm aware and focusing on that.
Personally, I'm not convinced that awareness follows form or that we need the physical body to be aware.
Our awareness never really encounters the world, all we ever know is our own nervous systems. I include the brain as part of the (physical) nervous system.
When our awareness can no longer communicate with the world through our nervous system, the world considers us to be dead and has no way of knowing if the awareness has carried on in some other form.
I'm also entertaining the idea that it may be our awareness that arranges the elements of the earth in such a way that results in living beings.
...Pardon....? :scratch: . :wtf: .
EDIT TO ADD:
That needs a whole new topic of discussion!
The answer is fairly simple. The man was never in the corner observing the room and these "credible" accounts are about as accurate as the average psychic cold reading. That doesn't mean that the brain is incapable of receiving sense input even when unconscious. Depends on what parts of the brain are shut down.
The confusion caused by the physical stress to his brain, after his mind had a while to try making sense of the chaos, settled on this is what a particular patch of neuron activity meant. Out of body experiences can be duplicated with drugs but nobody can report anything observed that could only have come from floating outside the body.
In the same way, a schizophrenic that hears voices doesn't actually have his eardrums move and there's nobody actually talking to him, but those voices sound very real in his head. Why are we so eager to believe the reported experience of someone claiming an out of body memory, but easily understand there's nobody actually whispering to the schizophrenic? Because we want to believe. That can trip up even the educated surgeon. It's a fascinating study of the mind in itself.
It's hard to understand that the brain isn't a recording device like a video tape. We insist on trusting our own memories and our beliefs about what we experienced. What we think we remember is a sloppy process and people are often certain enough about what they remember to send people to prison for life, only to have physical proof prove their memory was dead wrong a decade later. Even faced with proof they are wrong, people will continue to insist their memory is true. Because of that, we tend to put way too much trust in other people's memories and experiences.
Yepp just as Hamsaka explained I think.
It is more complicated than that from what we know so far. There can be no heart beat (old measure) no measurable brain activity and people have been revived in some circumstances. For example when partially frozen.
This body temperature freezing is done when conducting some modern brain surgery and a brain coma, no brain activity is measurable . . .
As far as we are aware, brain and body are required for consciousness. An empty room does not have a sense of sentience as far as we know. It may do but unlikely.
@Hamsaka I have a question for you. My grandma was at hospice for about a month before she passed away. It is recorded by hospice nurses that she stopped breathing, but her heart kept beating for another 45 minutes. She was not on a respirator of any kind, and she did not have a pacemaker. How is this possible? Could it have been her "will" or "spirit" keeping it going?
From what I've very briefly learned of the planes of existence, when a person dies, the last warm place on their body indicates where they will be reborn. (In this case, the last part of her body to be warm would have been her heart - the human realm.) Could this have been the case?
@jbailey84 If your grandmother actually did stop breathing, then no her heart would not keep beating for 45 minutes. It's likely that the nurses were wrong and the breathing was very shallow but present. There are many recorded instances of people being declared dead only to find out hours later on the morgue table that this was premature. That doesn't mean people actually came back from the dead or didn't breathe for an hour or so.
Yepp. So I wwas hoping to find descriptions of such cases in this thread on acount of the Title.
That is why it was misleading.
Ya dig ?
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/Victor
Some might find this of interest, this happened in 2011 in Dunedin Aotearoa (NZ)
"Death Meditation of a Tibetan Lama" It was big news back then...
Part one
Part two
Oh, thanks. I missed that. This does raise a good question. The studies I've been reading about all say that the patient was "clinically dead" (no heartbeat). So it means that for the purposes of consciousness research, the definition of "clinically dead" may need to be revised. On the other hand, if someone has no heartbeat and they're on the operating table, and even in some cases their eyes are taped shut, plus in at least one case, there were earplugs or some kind of device in the ears to eliminate sound, how do those patients hear and see what's going on in the operating room? That part seems like it's still a valid test. k
Lots of food for thought, that's for sure.
How was it determined she was no longer breathing? People's breath can become extremely subtle, virtually undetectable.
Cinorjer is right, her breathing was probably imperceptible, because the heart CAN'T beat without a supply of oxygen etc to fuel the heart cells. I don't know about her will or spirit, but it sure makes you wonder, doesn't it
? If she had oxygen on, this would be even more likely. Her heart must have been super healthy, and maybe there was something more. My last job involved a lot of hospice nursing. I concluded that people died the way they lived, at least in the context of expected death, like in hospice. Some I remember were so STUBBORN their bodies just would not let go. Some slipped away the moment their husband or wife finally left their side. It all made 'sense' to the family, who knew the person best.
I don't know anything about the planes of existence or if bodily conditions at death mean they'll take rebirth in a certain realm. Your guess is better than mine. It sounds like she was a special lady and very important to you, and that is most important.
My grandmother, just turned 92, passed away suddenly this last July. She had a bad stomach, and that's how it started. I barely got to the ER in time to be there when she left us. She just . . . went. Less than a week before, we were all together for my birthday and hers, which are a week apart. She was fine, and thankfully we got lots of pictures. She was the type to never want to bother anyone with her problems, and that's the way she died. After Grandpa died in 2008, she just wasn't herself anymore. It's like she stayed with us for our sake, not hers, and when she saw the opportunity to go, she didn't hesitate
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Brain death.
http://www.donorrecovery.org/learn/understanding-brain-death/
. . . and then a miracle happens, they go looking for a new foetus to inhabit? Possible, not very likely. Evidence or superstition?
That is a very good article @Lobster.
In looking for an uninhabited fetus, it's implied that craving for being survives the death of the body. If craving can survive physical death, what else survives? It makes a weird kind of 'sense' that no-frills consciousness may contain desire for life in a body, considering all the bodies and lives out there :buck: .
These cases discussed in the NDE studies where there's been cardiac arrest also mention there's no brain activity, but that clearly is different from brain death. None of the NDE patients has ever been declared "brain dead". So it's curious that while there's no measurable brain activity, something is observing the proceedings in the operating room, and that something, that consciousness, then typically leaves the scene and has an experience in a heavenly realm, or in a tunnel. So this consciousness appears to be independent of the brain at that point. Then, suddenly, the consciousness returns to the body (usually is "told" it has to return), and both cardiac and brain activity resume simultaneously.
Curious.
Yes, I didn't mean to hijack the thread. I will give it some more though and start a new discussion.
At this point, however, it is a difficult concept to put it in words (without causing some head scratching).
After reading that I had some questions for which I think I found the answers in this pdf.
https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/home/GetDigitalAsset/8470
Hope it helps others wondering the same things...
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Exactly! Hence my :scratch: . emoticon!
Interesting thing to discuss.... Hope you begin a thread....