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Sometimes it’s the living who haunt the dead.
A New York primary care doctor redefined the phrase “life after death” after finding that the brain remains active even after one’s heart stops, as detailed morbid study in the journal Resuscitation.
This means that the alleged deceased can likely hear the doctors announcing their time of death after they cease resuscitation efforts, the Daily Mail reported.
This macabre revelation was brought to light by Dr. Sam Parnia, of the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. He had spoken to patients who were revived after being declared clinically dead — when their heart stops beating — finding that they were able to recall events transpiring in their room with astounding accuracy.
In the Frankenstein-like study, Parnia shed light on why their postmortem memory is so lucid — because of “normal and near normal brain activity found up to an hour into resuscitation,” he previously told the Post.
“We were not only able to show the markers of lucid consciousness — we were also able to show that these experiences are unique and universal,” he said. “They’re different from dreams, illusions and delusions.” This didn’t seem to jive with doctor’s methods of declaring a patient dead when their ticker stopped.
To shed light on this surprising disconnect between heart and mind, Parnia and his team examined brain activity and awareness among 53 patients who survived cardiac arrest at 25 hospitals, mostly in the US and UK.
A staggering 40% of participants reported having memories or conscious thoughts, per the clip.
“In death, they have a perception that they are separate from their body,” Dr. Parnia said, “and then they can move around. But they’re in that [hospital] room and they’re gathering information. They felt that they were fully conscious.”
The clinically dead patients also had spikes of gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta brain waves associated with thinking and awareness, as determined by an electroencephalogram, a device that records brain activity with electrodes. These were present 35 to 60 minutes after the person’s heart stopped.
From this, Dr. Parnia concluded that the brain is surprisingly durable.
“Although doctors have long thought that the brain suffers permanent damage about 10 minutes after the heart stops supplying it with oxygen, our work found that the brain can show signs of electrical recovery long into ongoing CPR,” he said in a statement.
In fact, not only does the brain survive — it functions at a high level.
Like a seemingly defunct computer rebooting, this neurological surge is believed to induce a super-focused state, possibly explaining why people might hear their surroundings in great detail — including medics’ death declarations — even though their body is technically dead.
This energy burst also allows these resurrectees to access everything in their mind simultaneously, hence the perception that their life is flashing before their eyes.
“As the brain shuts down, because of a lack of blood flow in death, the normal braking systems in the brain are removed, known as disinhibition,” Dr. Parnia explained. “This enables people to have access to their entire consciousness. All their thoughts, memories, all their emotional states, everything that they’ve ever done, which they relive through the perspective of morality and ethics.”
Along with satisfying morbid curiosity, this pioneering research could perhaps change the way doctors restart the heart or deal with brain injuries caused by cardiac arrest.
