Science

“Our Minds May Be Separate from Our Brains”

Author Amy K. Hall Published on 10/18/2014

Medical Daily reports in “Near-Death Experiences Suggest Consciousness Continues Beyond Death”:

A new study of cardiac arrest patients indicates that 46 percent had memories of the time during which they were clinically dead, while two percent could explicitly recall seeing and hearing events related to their resuscitation. These results, the researchers say, suggest consciousness is present beyond the point at which scientists can detect it. Our minds, then, may be separate from our brains.

The UK Independent explains more:

Experts currently believe 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 at all once that has happened.

But scientists in the new study said they heard compelling evidence that patients experienced real events for up to three minutes after this had happened—and could recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated.

Dr. Sam Parnia, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and a former research fellow at the University of Southampton who led the research, said that he previously [thought] that patients who described near-death experiences were only relating hallucinatory events....

Dr. Parnia’s study involved 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria, and has been published in the journal Resuscitation.

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

For more on this subject, see “Newsweek: Heaven Is Real,” “What We Can and Cannot Learn from Near Death Experiences” (an interview with Gary Habermas), and “Near Death Experiences and the Afterlife” (a lecture by Habermas).

(HT: Wintery Knight)