Encefalus

Near-Death Experiences: What Really Happens?

I stumbled upon this link the other day. It’s about one of the most exciting experiments I’ve ever seen in my life. Scientists will try to study what really happens with near-death experiences.

Many reports of near-death experiences sound the same: a welcoming white light and a replay of memories. But now scientists aim to study what really happens to the brain and consciousness when someone is on the verge of dying.

In a new study called AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), doctors will examine patients in hospitals in Europe and North America who reach a state called cardiac arrest. 

Surely death is a matter that concerns us all. Since the dawn of time man has created any kind of crazy theory about what goes on after death. Is there an after-life? Is there heaven and hell? Is there a purgatory? Reincarnation maybe? Mediums and parapsychological experiments, while very popular in the 19th century, didn’t manage to prove anything. Most self-claimed psychics just proved to be charlatans and parapsychology hasn’t come to any conclusive study about any death-related phenomenon. 

It’s good to see that death starts once again to be a matter of hard science. Of course, talking to the dead isn’t science. However, observing procedures and collecting data is. Maybe death is an illusive subject that the human mind is not meant to comprehend it. However, there is a slight hole through which we can take a glimpse at what happens at that critical moment when life seems to cease.

A possible vision of the underworld?!?!?!??

Science has long struggled to define death, and to determine when the precise moment of death occurs. Now though, most doctors consider death more of a process than an event. A person is thought to have died when he stops breathing, his heart stops beating, and his brain activity ceases.

"During a cardiac arrest, all three criteria of death are present," Parnia said. "There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds to an hour or more, in which emergency medical efforts may succeed in restarting the heart and reversing the dying process. What people experience during this period of cardiac arrest provides a unique window of understanding into what we are all likely to experience during the dying process."

Ascent Into the Empyrean by Hieronymus Bosch

Of course, near-death experiences and light tunnels are not necessarily a doorway to another realm. They could simply be the product of firing neurons

Previous research suggests about 10 to 20 percent of people who live through cardiac arrest report lucid, well-structured thought processes, reasoning, memories and sometimes detailed recall of events during their encounter with death.

One study found that people who reported peaceful feelings, bright light and out-of-body experiences during a brush with death are more likely to have had difficulty separating sleep from wakefulness in their everyday lives. Both before and after their near-death experiences, these people often have symptoms of the rapid-eye movement (REM) state of sleep while awake.

Whatever the case might be, I find this to be a truly exciting study. I think it is a real scientific progress, since scientists decide to take on a full scale research on subjects that usually have to do with new-agers and occult lovers. I can’t wait to see the conclusion of this research, which I hope it will be proven to be something unexplainable. And that, not because I’m a new age freak, but because an unexplainable phenomenon at the edge of life, could provide a lot of thought concerning the nature of consciousness and our theories about mind and brain, the neurological paradigm and even physics. Surely psychology can’t get any more interesting than that!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Consciousness, General, Philosophical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.