Consciousness Continues To Function After Clinical Death, According To Study
A couple of days ago the general media spread the news that A group of scientists had discovered that people’s consciousness can continue functioning up to 3 minutes after death That is, in some cases people are aware of what is happening around them several seconds after death occurs, and this conclusion has been reached through the study of many cases in which resuscitated people are capable of remembering what happened to them on their “transition to death.” However, the results that were actually 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 real death in which injuries to vital organs (and, especially, the brain) make recovery impossible and trigger the beginning of the degradation of all the cells in the body.
That 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 beyond but rather due to factors that can be perfectly addressed by science. That is why a team of researchers from the University of Southhampton set out to find out what happens with our consciousness in that space between clinical and real death, and they 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 magazine Resuscitation.
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 not being able to remember specific things.
On the other hand, 2% of these patients claimed to remember specific aspects of what was happening around them during clinical death or they described experiences of seeing things from a different point of view than the one that 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 near-death experiences are attributed to hallucinations by the scientific community and, of course, it is difficult to know if people who claim to have maintained some type 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 It may mean that this deceptive sensation is a product of your recovery after cardiac arrest and that therefore their memory has failed them, filling an “empty” space of consciousness, but it could also be because they have been aware of many things that were happening but the specific memories have disappeared due to the medication or the processes organics related to recovery.
A contrasted 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 with what has 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 these objective markers could be compared with the information he gave.
This is notable, since it is considered that consciousness disconnects 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 They tell us nothing about the afterlife or a different plane of existence That some people remain conscious after clinical death does not mean that it has been proven 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.
