Yuri Serdyukov, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Sociology and Law of the Far Eastern State University of Railways (Khabarovsk), proposed to the scientific community a new concept of the formation of subjective reality during clinical death, which makes it possible to give a natural scientific explanation of the feelings that a person experiences in this particular condition. Some patients who find themselves in such a situation can be brought back to life, and their stories about their experiences are often interpreted as pictures of "hell" or "heaven". However, the same pictures can be explained without any mysticism by analyzing physiological and mental processes.
Illustration by RIA Novosti. A. Polyanina
Yuri Serdyukov proceeds from the indisputable fact that in case of clinical death, despite the loss of sensory contact with reality, cessation of breathing and cessation of blood circulation, the brain continues to live. Its death occurs gradually: the first to die are the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the last to die is the stem structures. It is practically impossible to establish exactly how long this process takes, since the decrease in the electrical activity of the brain at some point goes beyond the sensitivity limit of modern equipment.
British resuscitator Sam Parnia, who moved to the United States, published a book in 2013 where he says that a person can be brought back to life after 12, and after 24, and sometimes even 72 hours after death. And it is possible in a large number of cases to bring back to life a patient whose heart stopped two hours ago. While this process is complex, painstaking, expensive, but in the future, the revitalization of people will become an ordinary medical manipulation. This means that the brain lives for a very long time after death, and its cells do not die off five minutes after cardiac arrest, as previously thought.
Yuri Serdyukov, Doctor of Philosophy / ria.ru
A valuable source of knowledge about a person in a state of clinical death is also the book by Lev Moiseevich Litvak, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor of Psychiatry, who was in a coma for 26 days and, after coming out of it, described in detail what he felt. Lev Litvak divides this terminal state into four stages: the first stage is darkness; the second stage is vital depression; the third stage is euphoria; the fourth stage is the exit from the terminal state. Since the author is a psychiatrist by profession, he explains these stages as part of the psychopathological process. Moreover, he specifically compares a number of mystical experiences with experiences in acute psychosis and reveals their commonality, which makes it possible to better explain the tendency to mystical interpretations of "near-death experience."
According to Yuri Serdyukov, being in a coma is difficult to consider as psychosis, since psychosis is a pronounced disorder of mental activity, which in this case is difficult to prove. Serdyukov believes that in the "terminal state of consciousness" there is a disintegration of the psyche, a person loses the ability to verbal-logical thinking.
Subjective reality turns into an undivided stream of oniric (dream) experiences created by spontaneous brain activity. The content of experiences is conditioned by three factors: 1) the entire life lived, starting from the prenatal period, when the ability to perceive sound information is formed; 2) congenital mental structures of the personality, which were formed during the perinatal period; 3) activation of certain genetic structures in a situation of severe stress, which is clinical death.
The essence of Yuri Serdyukov's concept is the assertion that a person is able to influence the content of near-death experiences. To do this, it is necessary to form a life-affirming worldview, purposefully create a complex of stable positive impressions that are reliably fixed in the neurodynamic structures of our brain and are able to resist decay processes in a state of clinical death.
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With the implementation of such a life attitude, the risk of deep vital depression, the danger of immersion in the gloomy gray world presented in the descriptions of hell, and, on the contrary, the likelihood of bright, joyful experiences characteristic of the image of paradise increases.
Another significant aspect of near-death experiences, identified in the concept of Professor Serdyukov, is as follows: since they occur in conditions where there are no natural time regulators (primarily sunlight, heart rhythms), subjectively, they can last forever. Although objectively, in physical time, they do not last long. And in this subjectively eternal being, the whole previous life seems to a person just an episode.
New ideas were expressed by Yuri Serdyukov at the international interdisciplinary seminar "Neurophilosophy" held at the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
Anna Urmantseva