Consciousness continues to function after clinical death

A couple of days ago the general media spread the news that a group of scientists had discovered that people's consciousness can continue to function up to 3 minutes after death. That is to say, that in some cases people are aware of what is happening around them several seconds after the death occurs, and that the to this conclusion through the study of many cases in which resuscitated people are able to remember what happened to them in "their transit to the death". However, the actual results obtained in this study are somewhat different.

The concept of what is death it is not as simple as it may seem. There is clinical death, in which the heart and lungs stop working, and the actual death, in which the injuries produced in the vital organs (and, especially, in the brain) make recovery impossible and trigger the initiation of the degradation of all cells in the body.

This means that what we often call 'death' is actually a reversible process, and it is for reasons that have nothing to do with mysterious forces that act from the beyond, but rather for factors that are perfectly approachable by science. That's why a team of researchers from the University of Southhampton set out to find out what's going on with our consciousness in that space that remains between clinical and real death, and have come to the conclusion that in a large part of the cases

it can continue to function when the heart has stopped beating.

The article they wrote was made public almost a year ago through the magazine resuscitation.

What did the study consist of?

The team of researchers studied 2,600 cases of patients from 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States to investigate different cases of near-death experiences. The results showed that 39% of patients able to undergo structured interviews reported retaining a sense of having been conscious during clinical death, despite not being able to remember specific things.

On the other hand, 2% of these patients they claimed to remember specific aspects of what was happening around them during clinical death, or they described experiences of seeing things from a point of view other than that which would correspond to the position of their body (Out of Body Experiences).

Real or hallucination?

The Out of Body Experiences and the sensations of visual perception in experiences at the limit of death are attributed to hallucinations by the scientific community and, of course, it is difficult to know if the people who say they have maintained some kind of consciousness they lie or speak from the delusion of having experienced hallucinations.

The fact that many do not remember specific aspects of what happened to them on the brink of death it may mean that this deceptive feeling is a product of your recovery after cardiac arrest and that therefore memory has failed them by filling an "empty" space of consciousness, but it could also be because they have been aware of many things that happened but the specific memories have disappeared due to the effect of the medication or the organic processes related to the recovery.

A proven case of consciousness after clinical death

However, in at least one of the cases it has been possible to verify that their specific memories correspond to what has happened in reality. In this study there is a validated case of a patient who maintains consciousness connected to the outside, since a test was done with sound stimuli after cardiac arrest and therefore it has been possible to compare these objective markers with the information that gave.

This is remarkable, since consciousness is considered to be disconnected from reality before or just after the heart is shut down. stop, and yet in this case this rule was not met, since it is an example of conscious experience not based on hallucinations.

summarizing

The results of this study they tell us nothing about the afterlife or about a different plane of existence. The fact that some people remain conscious after clinical death does not even mean that they have demonstrated that there is life after death or that consciousness is independent of what happens in our body.

It simply tells us that the brain and other vital organs work at different times in near-death experiences, and that it is possible that after cardiac arrest our perception of reality continues to function at least in part. Which, when you think about it, is not a very pleasant idea.

Bibliographic references:

• Parnia S, et al. (2014). AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study. Resuscitation, 85(12), pp. 1799 - 18005.