Consciousness continues to function after clinical death, study shows

Up to three minutes after death, we are able to remain conscious.

A couple of days ago, the general media spread the news that a group of scientists had discovered that people's a group of scientists had discovered that people's consciousness can continue to function for 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 death occurs, and that this conclusion has been reached through the study of many cases in which reanimated people are able to remember what happened to them in "their transit to death". However, the actual results obtained in this study are somewhat different.

The concept of what is death is not as simple as it may seem. There is such a thing as clinical deathin which the Heart and lungs cease to function, and the actual death actual deathin which injuries to vital organs (and especially the brain) make recovery impossible and trigger the onset of degradation of all the body's cells.

This means that what we often call 'death' is actually a reversible process. reversible processAnd it is reversible for reasons that have nothing to do with mysterious forces acting from beyond the grave, but rather with factors that are perfectly amenable to science. That is why a team of researchers at the University of Southhampton set out to find out what happens to our consciousness in the space between clinical and real death, and have come to the conclusion that in most 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 journal Resuscitation.

What did the study consist of?

The team of researchers studied 2,600 patient cases 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 during clinical death, despite not being able to remember specific things.

On the other hand, 2% of these patients reported remembering specific aspects of what was going on around them during clinical death, or described experiences of seeing their surroundings during clinical deathor described experiences of seeing things from a point of view other than the one that would correspond to their body placement (Out of Body Experiences).

Real or hallucination?

The Out of Body Experiences and sensations of visual perception in near-death experiences are attributed to hallucinations. hallucinations by the scientific community and, of course, it is difficult to know whether people who claim to have maintained some kind of consciousness are lying or speaking 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 may mean that this deluded sensation of having experienced hallucinations is not a true story. may mean that this deluded sensation is a product of their recovery from cardiac arrest and that therefore their memory has failed them, filling an "empty" space of consciousness, but it could also be due to the fact that they have been aware of many of the things that happened but the specific memories have disappeared due to medication or organic processes related to recovery.

A contrasting case of consciousness after clinical death

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

This is remarkable, since it is considered that consciousness is disconnected from reality before or just after the heart stops, 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 tell us nothing about the afterlife or a different plane of existence.. That some people remain conscious after clinical death does not mean either that it has been 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 during near-death experiences. in experiences on the verge of death, and that it is possible that after cardiac arrest our perception of reality continues to function at least in part. Which, come to think of it, is not too pleasant an idea.

Bibliographic references:

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