Light at the end of the tunnel. This is what some people observe at the time of death. A person feels that he is flying into some pipe, well, or mine. Sometimes he sees relatives or doctors bustling around his body, talking to each other, but they don't pay attention to him … However, foreign scientists have recorded many other strange sensations during the transition from life to death.
GIVE DISCHARGE
In 2011, Mr. A., a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to a hospital in Southampton, Hampshire after fainting at work. Doctors assessed the patient's condition as critical. Doctors began to insert a catheter into his groin, but suddenly his heart stopped. As soon as the flow of oxygen to the brain stopped, the brain waveform stretched out into a thin thread. Mr. A. passed away. Doctors rushed to save the patient.
Usually, in such cases, resort to an automatic external defibrillator (AED) - a device with which the patient receives an electrical shock that helps to restart the heart. The most amazing thing is that Mr. A. remembers everything that happened to him at that time. He heard someone shout twice loudly: "Give me a shock!" In the intervals between these two commands, he raised his eyes and saw a stranger near the ceiling in the far corner of the room, beckoning him with her hand.
The Englishman separated from his own body and flew towards the hovering woman. “It seemed to me then that this lady knew me. I wanted to be close to her, I felt that I could trust her, that she was there for a reason. But for what reason she came here, I did not know. I easily, literally in a second, flew up to her and from there, from above, I looked at her, at the nurse and some bald man."
When the story became known to BBC Future, they secured permission to conduct a fact-check. Indeed, the hospital records contained two verbal commands for the use of electric shock. The descriptions of the medical personnel in the room, given later by Mr. A., as well as all their actions, completely coincided with what actually happened. He was describing things that happened over the course of three minutes that, according to our knowledge of biology, he could not have any idea. After all, he was dead.
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The case at the Southampton Clinic, captured in a report published in the journal of the European Council of Critical Care Medicine, is just one of many that broadens conventional wisdom about human dying. Until now, researchers have assumed that a person stops perceiving anything around with the last beat of the heart.
As soon as our “fiery motor” stops, life-giving streams of blood are no longer sent to the brain, and a person ceases to be aware of himself and everything around him. This moment in medicine is called death. However, the further scientists advance in the study of the science of death, the more often voices are heard that such a condition can be reversible. Which cannot but inspire optimism.
THERE IS SUCH THEME
For many years, those who managed to survive not only the state of clinical death, but also the accompanying sensations, often shared their memories of their experiences. For the time being, science refused to study life after death. Why, the topic was taboo. Scientists did not even want to hear that after death a person could show any signs of life.
Doctors in most cases brushed aside such evidence, considering them hallucinations, fiction, lies - anything, but not reality. Researchers, too, until some time were not eager to immerse themselves in the study of such states, mainly because they considered them to be beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.
However, in the second half of the 20th century, the situation began to change. There is a lot of research on this topic. American psychologist and psychiatrist Raymond Moody, a pioneer in this field, who wrote the famous book "Life After Death", was one of the first to pay attention to near-death experiences and collected a huge amount of statistical material. In 1978, the International Association for the Study of Near-Death Experience (IANDS) was founded.
In 1998, Jeffrey Long, M. D. founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF). The banner of his predecessors was taken up by American Sam Parnia, a physician who deals with patients in critical conditions, and director of research in the field of intensive care at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York.
Together with colleagues from 17 treatment and research centers in the US and UK, he decided to see if people on their deathbed are experiencing any sensations. Over the course of four years, a group of scientists led by Parnia collected and analyzed more than two thousand cases of cardiac arrest, that is, those moments when the heart stops beating and a person officially becomes dead.
Of these people, doctors managed to revive only 16% of patients. Parnia and his colleagues were able to talk with 101 of them, that is, with about one in three. “Our goal is to understand what the experience of death is from a mental and cognitive (cognitive) point of view. If we are dealing with people who claim that they perceived what was happening at the time of death by ear and visually, we had to figure out whether they were really aware of what was happening to them."
SEVEN SIGNS
It turned out that about 50% of people who have experienced "life after death" can remember something. But unlike Mr. A. and another lady, whose story of being outside her own body could not be verified on the basis of external data, the experience of the other patients had nothing to do with the events that took place at the time of their death. They told of some hallucinatory dreamlike stories.
Sam Parnia and his assistants have divided all stories into seven thematic categories.
So what do people experience during the transition from life to death?
Most of the subjects confessed that they remember the feeling of fear. The other six experiences are: visions of animals and plants, glare, violence and persecution, visions of a family, déjà vu, or already "seen", memories of events after cardiac arrest. The patients admitted that mental experiences range in nature from the most terrifying to the most blissful.
"We had to state the fact," Parnia confessed, "that the mental perception of death is much broader than previously thought."
“I had to go through a ritual, and it was a burning ritual,” one of the patients recalled. "There were four people with me, and everyone who went to bed was dying … I saw people being buried in coffins in an upright position."
Another recalls being "dragged deep under water," and another recalled that he was "told that I would die, and the fastest way to die is to say the last short word I can remember."
Although other subjects experienced exactly the opposite feelings. 22% reported "pacification and pleasant feelings." Some saw "all kinds of plants, but not flowers" or "lions and tigers", others basked in the glow of "bright light" or reunited with their families.
Others received a kind of insight: "I knew in advance that these people would do this and that, although they themselves had not thought about it yet." Heightened senses, a distorted perception of the passage of time and a sense of isolation from their own body - all this took place among those who literally returned from the other world.
ON THE WAY TO TRUTH
Sam Parnia came to a definite conclusion: when we believe that people are dead, they have some feelings. Which one depends on the whole experience of their previous life. A native of Sri Lanka, returning from the "kingdom of the dead", admitted that he had seen Krishna. The Briton talked about visions of Jesus, and these pictures were akin to how Europeans imagine the Son of God. Many patients said that they saw hell and heaven as we used to imagine them.
Apparently, what has been invested in us since birth pops up in our head at the most critical moments. “There seem to be thousands and thousands of different interpretations, which depend on where you were born and what your life experience is,” Parnia is convinced.
Researchers in the course of the experiment were unable to identify signs that would indicate in advance who is most likely to be able to remember something about their own death. They also cannot yet understand why nightmares and horrors are shown to some, while others, on the contrary, fall into euphoria.
But one thing is clear: there are many more people who have been to the other world than people usually think. It's just that most of these memories are erased as a result of cerebral edema after cardiac arrest, as well as due to the use of strong sedatives, which they are prescribed in the hospital.
According to Parnia, some people lose their fear of death and begin to treat it philosophically, while others develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Based on the data obtained, the American scientist says that death is just a subject of scientific knowledge that requires further work.
Oksana VOLKOVA