The transition from life to death in everyday consciousness is often associated with a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. However, as the BBC Future correspondent found out, reports of many other very strange cases have been recorded, and scientists intend to finally figure it out.
In 2011, Mr. A., a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to a hospital in Southampton after fainting at work. The doctors were just injecting a catheter into his groin when suddenly his heart stopped. As soon as the flow of oxygen to the brain stopped, the oscillogram stretched out into a thin thread. Mr. A. is dead. But despite this, he remembers what happened next.
The staff immediately used an automatic external defibrillator (AED), a machine that uses electric shock to restart the heart. A. heard a mechanical voice say twice: "Give me a shock." In the intervals between these two commands, he looked up and saw some strange woman who beckoned him from the far corner of the room, hovering somewhere near the ceiling. He joined her, leaving his motionless body where it was. “I felt that she knew me. I also felt that I could trust her and that she was here for a reason. But what that reason was, I did not know, - A. recalled later. - The next second I was already up there and looked down at myself, at my sister and at some bald man."
The inspection showed that the hospital records included two verbal commands for the use of AED. Mr. A's later descriptions of the people in the room whom he could not see before he lost consciousness and their actions were also perfectly accurate. He was describing things that happened over the course of three minutes, which, if we trust our knowledge of biology, he could not have known.
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The story of Mr. A., described in a report published in the journal of the European Council of Resuscitation, is just one of the cases that refute the generally accepted beliefs about the state of death in humans. Until now, researchers have proceeded from the fact that as soon as the heart stops beating and sending life-giving streams of blood to the human brain, it ceases to be aware of itself and everything around it. From this moment on, the person is essentially dead. However, the further we advance in the study of the science of death, the better we begin to understand that such conditions can be reversible.
For many years, those who managed to return from these places and states incomprehensible to the mind, often shared their memories of the event they experienced. Doctors in most cases dismiss such evidence, calling them hallucinations, and researchers until recently were reluctant to dive into the study of such "near-death" states, mainly because they considered them to be beyond the scope of scientific knowledge.
However, Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and director of critical care research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, teamed up with colleagues from 17 treatment and research centers in the United States and the United Kingdom to put an end to the speculation about what people who are on their deathbed experience and do not experience. Scientists believe that they will be able to collect scientific data on the potentially last moments of the life of the dying. Over the course of four years, they analyzed more than two thousand cases of cardiac arrest, that is, those moments when the heart stops beating and a person officially becomes dead.
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Of this number of patients, doctors managed to return 16% from the dead. Parnia and his colleagues were able to talk with 101 of them, i.e. about one in three. “Our goal was to try to understand, first of all, what it is like to experience death from a mental and cognitive (cognitive) point of view,” says Parnia. - And further. 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 tastes of death
Mr. A. is not the only patient with a memory of his own death. Almost 50% of those people interviewed by the researchers could recall something. However, unlike Mr. A. and another woman, whose account of being out of her own body could not be verified on the basis of external data, the experiences of other patients did not seem to be related to the events that took place immediately at the time of their death. Instead, they reproduced some dreamlike hallucinatory scenarios, which Parnia and his co-authors divided into seven thematic categories. “Most of them don't fit with what is called a near-death experience,” Parnia says. "The mental perception of death seems to be much broader than previously thought."
The seven thematic categories of experiences are:
- fear;
- visions of animals and plants;
- bright light;
- violence and harassment;
- deja vu or "already seen";
- family vision;
- memories of events after cardiac arrest.
These mental experiences range in nature from utterly terrifying to blissful. Some people, for example, recalled experiencing feelings of fear, suffering, or persecution. “I had to go through a ritual, and it was a burning ritual,” recalled one of the patients. "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."
However, other respondents experienced exactly the opposite sensations. 22% reported experiencing a state of "peace and agreeableness." Some saw something alive: "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 reported a distinct sense of déjà vu: "I knew what these people were going to do before they did this and that." Heightened feelings, a distorted perception of the passage of time, and a sense of being disconnected from one's own body were also fairly common sensations reported by survivors of dying.
While it is “quite obvious that people experience something while they are dead,” Parnia says, how these individuals interpret their experiences depends entirely on their past life and experience, as well as on their previous beliefs. Someone from India may, after returning from the dead, tell that he saw Krishna, while a native of the Midwest of the USA, after a similar experience, will tell that he saw God as the American Christians living in those lands imagine him. “If a father in the Midwest tells his child, 'When you die, you will meet Jesus, and he will be filled with love and compassion,' - of course, the child will imagine just that,” Parnia says. - He will come back and say: 'Yes, dad, you were right. I actually saw Jesus!“But can any of us really know Jesus or God the Father? You don't know what God is like. And I don't know what God is. Except that this is a man with a long gray beard. But this is just a picture."
“I have no idea what all these things mean - soul, heaven, hell. There are, apparently, thousands and thousands of different interpretations, which depend on where you were born and what your life experience is, he continues. "It is important to isolate all these evidence from the realities of religious teachings and consider them objectively."
Typical cases
Scientists have not yet been able 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 explain why some people go through a terrifying scenario, while others, on the contrary, fall into euphoria. As Parnia points out, it is very likely that there are far more people who have experienced "near-death" than the figures obtained in the research reflect. For many people, the memory of this is simply erased by swelling of the brain after cardiac arrest, as well as by taking strong sedatives that are prescribed in the hospital.
Even if people cannot clearly remember what they experienced at the time of death, this experience can affect them on a subconscious level. Parnia puts forward a hypothesis with which he hopes to explain such different reactions of patients who have experienced cardiac arrest after recovery: some lose their fear of death and begin to relate to life more altruistically, while others develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Parnia and his colleagues are already planning new research based on previous findings to help them understand some of these issues. They also hope that their work will help broaden the traditional discourse on death, which is characterized by extremes, and free it from restrictions associated with religious beliefs or skepticism.
Death should be viewed in the same way as any other subject of scientific knowledge. “Anyone with a more or less objective mindset would agree with those that further investigation is required,” Parnia says. - We have both funds and technologies. It's time to take it and do it."
Rachel Newer