Article: Near-death experiences and brain activity

There may be a scientific explanation for the vivid near-death experiences, such as seeing a shining light, that some people report after surviving a heart attack, US scientists said Monday.

Apparently, the brain keeps on working for up to 30 seconds after blood flow stops, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
 
This is an interesting study, and may shed some light on NDEs. Many people who experienced NDEs (most I think) believe that it proves that there is life after death. It definitely raises questions about our understanding of consciousness and the brain.
 
There should be biological symptoms for most extra-sensory phenomenon and therefore a scientific interpretation, that doesn't make it any less supernatural.
 
One week ago...

For centuries, doctors have considered a person to be dead once their heart stops beating. But according to Dr. Sam Parnia of SUNY's Stony Brook University, even after someone's heart has stopped and their brain is no longer active, they can be brought back to life. In Dr. Parnia's own words, "death is reversible."

He may sound crazy, but he has numbers to back him. Reactivating someone's heart, most commonly done with CPR, is called resuscitation. The average resuscitation rate in the US and UK is around 17%. At Dr. Parnia's hospital, the rate is around 35% — and increasing.

How? The science of resuscitation has become a specialized field, one that not many doctors know much about. Dr. Parnia, however, not only knows the science, but has turned it into an art. The very first thing he tells people inquiring about resuscitation is that the idea that brain cells began rapidly dying a few minutes after the heart stops is nonsense. It takes hours for brain cells to wither, he says, but those hours are crucial.

When resuscitating a patient, Dr. Parnia first cools down the body to slow cell decay. He then performs specific chest compressions, delivering eight breaths a minute. If the patient's health issue is lingering, he performs the operation alongside the compressions, and when the operation is over, he restarts the heart. In a third of the cases, Dr. Parnia brings the dead back to life — sometimes hours after they have died.

Obviously, there are limitations on the resuscitations he can perform. In general, Dr. Parnia only performs resuscitations on healthy, middle-aged-or-younger people with singular health issues, such as a heart attack or blood loss. He also performs them immediately after someone has passed away, giving him more time to perform critical operations.

Still, with his incredible success rate, Dr. Parnia is convinced that we could soon be reviving people as much as 24 hours after they have passed away. His new book, Erasing Death, is aimed at spreading knowledge of resuscitation science to doctors who have long ago written it off as quackery.

This story of science should show us that we still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding even the most basic of bodily functions, and that sciences that were popular long ago might be revisited today to better results. We can all applaud Dr. Parnia for persevering in a field that many dismissed, thereby saving countless lives.

But it also brings up an interesting question: what happens to people in the state between life and death? They're not really dead if they can come back to life, but if their heart and brain aren't functioning, then they're also not truly alive. In his research on resuscitation, Dr. Parnia has unknowingly tapped into an entirely new state of existence that we're only just beginning to even acknowledge, much less explore. This isn't just a medical breakthrough, but a religious, spiritual, and humanistic one, and we'll probably be hearing about it for decades to come.
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http://www.policymic.com/articles/5...lieves-he-can-bring-people-back-from-the-dead

Good thing he doesn't work in Africa as the [superstitious] would burn him as a witch.
 
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Article from 2010:

Some say they floated above their own body, others claim to have walked along a light-filled tunnel or to have been suffused with a sense of peace.

But rather than being a brush with the afterlife, near-death experiences may simply be caused by an electrical storm in the dying brain.

A study of the brains of critically ill men and women revealed a brief burst of activity moments before death.

Researcher Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor, said: 'We think that near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy as the brain runs out of oxygen.

As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse.

'It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.'

Dr Chawla, of the George Washington University medical centre in Washington DC, monitored the brain activity of seven terminally-ill people to ensure the painkillers they were being given were working.

In each case, the gradual tailing off of brain activity in the hour or so before death was interrupted by a brief spurt of action, lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes.

Levels were similar to those seen in fully-conscious people - even though blood pressure was so low as to be undetectable - and could generate vivid images and feelings, said the researcher.

Writing in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, he said: 'We speculate that in those patients who are successfully revived, they may recall the images and memories triggered by this cascade.

'We offer this as a potential explanation for the clarity in which many patients have "out of body" experiences when successfully revived from a near-death event.'

Research released last month put near-death experiences down to high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood altering the chemical balance of the brain and tricking it into 'seeing' things.

A previous study found that almost one in five heart attack patients whose lives were saved reported having near-death experiences.

These included out-of-body experiences, pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives or their life 'flashing before their eyes'.

Southampton University researchers are trying to pin down whether the experiences have a medical explanation by asking 1,500 heart attack patients to recall any memories after their cardiac arrest.

In one test, pictures that can be seen only from above are being placed on high shelves in resuscitation rooms in 25 UK and U.S. hospitals.

If any patients can recall the images, it will suggest a genuine out-of-body experience. Lead researcher Dr Sam Parnia said: 'We see death as a moment but actually it is a process which modern medicine can often reverse.

Death starts when the heart stops beating, but we can intervene and bring people back to life, sometimes even after three to four hours when they are kept very cold.

'It could be that a far higher proportion of people have near-death experiences but don't remember them.'

He added that Dr Chawla had not provided proof that the electrical surges he recorded were linked to near-death experiences, saying: 'Since all the patients died, we cannot tell what they were experiencing.'
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There's always a light at the end of a tunnel, just pray it's not a train.
 
Still does not explain them NDE folk who can accuratley tell you what was going on outside the operating theatre, in some documented cases in other rooms on a different floor of the hospital whilst they are "dead"
 
Mortymoose said:
Still does not explain them NDE folk who can accuratley tell you what was going on outside the operating theatre, in some documented cases in other rooms on a different floor of the hospital whilst they are "dead"
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Exactly.
 
Mortymoose said:
Still does not explain them NDE folk who can accuratley tell you what was going on outside the operating theatre, in some documented cases in other rooms on a different floor of the hospital whilst they are "dead"
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In absolutely none of the actual scientific research into NDEs have they encountered such a verifiable story. In fact if you read up on the Aware study I linked to earlier, they have pretty much debunked this. They place markers within the operating theatre to test whether claimants can identify them. To date they've had many claims, but not a single person has identified a marker.

What's more important here is understanding why people make these claims in the first place. Lying, hallucination, or some other physiological action? There is no doubting that some people truly believe that they've had an out of body NDE, but so far all evidence points to it being a figment of their imaginations.

There are numerous sites out there, like the one Hosehead linked to earlier (I didn't really give it a proper read) that intentionally bastardise Sam Parnia's work. They draw incredible conclusions from just abstracts of yet to be published research. They are easy to spot. If you want to know about the actual scientific investigations then check the Aware study's site...
 
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Ever since I experienced two OBE 's when I was around 20, i don;t give a toss what the naysayers say, you have a soul and it leaves your body. I am not a religious okie.... and I don;t care for all the scientific theories... I know what happened to me, I know what I saw, and I promised myself never to forget it.....

Examples? I have at home on my ipad... will link later. I find this subject type very interesting and have researched it for the last 20 odd years....
 
Nobody doubts that to you it is a very real experience. Nobody is trying to discount that either. People are trying to understand it better, and all indications point to it being psychosomatic. The brain is an incredible piece of machinery and can absolutely manipulate the perception of what we experience...
 
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