From Fiction to Fact

From Fiction to Fact

A team based in the UK spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences during their cardiac arrest, after they came back to life. The team's finding was: almost 40 per cent of the survivors recalled having some form of "awareness" during the time that they had been declared clinically dead. One man who had been clinically dead - then brought back to life - accurately described what had been happening in the room.

The popular notion among experts is that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating – and that it is not possible to be aware of anything once that happens.

But scientists who participated in the new study, said they had found compelling evidence that patients experienced real events happening around them - for up to three minutes - after death happened – and could even recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated back to life.

Dr Sam Parnia, Assistant Professor at the State University of New York and former Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, who led the research, said he had previously held the belief that patients who described near-death experiences were only relating hallucinatory events.

However, based on evidence provided by the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, Dr Parnia now admits: "We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating. But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes."

The man had given a "very credible" account of what had been going on while doctors and nurses were trying to bring him back to life – and says that he felt he was observing his resuscitation from the corner of the room.

On being revived back to life, the man was able to describe everything that happened in the room in the intermittent period, but more importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three-minute intervals. That was how doctors could time the experienced! Dr Parnia concludes, "He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him, had actually happened."Dr Parnia’s study involved 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. It has also been published in the "Resuscitation" journal.

About 46 per cent of those who survived had experienced a broad range of mental recollections, nine per cent had experiences that were compatible with traditional definitions of a near-death experience, and two per cent had exhibited full awareness with explicit recall of "seeing" and "hearing" events – or out-of-body experiences.

Dr Parnia said that the findings of the study as a whole had suggested that "the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice."Dr Jerry Nolan, editor-in-chief of the journal which published the research, said: "The researchers are to be congratulated on the completion of a fascinating study that will open the door to more extensive research into what happens when we die."

As Sarah Knapton, Science Correspondent of The Telegraph, put it: Death is a depressingly inevitable consequence of life. But with scientists believing that they may have found some light at the end of the tunnel, also sheds light on a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread skepticism. Although many patients could not recall specific details later, some common themes did emerge. One in five apparently recalled feeling an unusual sense of peace...Another one-third of the patients recalled having a sense of time slowing down or speeding up.

Yet others recalled seeing a bright light - like a golden flash - or the sun shining...

Others recounted drowning or being dragged through deep water...13 per cent said they felt a heightened sense of being...

The same 13 per cent of course, stated the obvious: that they had felt separated from their bodies...