Each person sooner or later asks himself the question: what will happen to him after physical death? Will everything end with the last breath, or will the soul continue to exist beyond the threshold of life? In fact, the last such threshold, at which any creature lingers for a few minutes, as if pondering whether to return back or take a step forward, decisively shutting the door of our world, is the state of clinical death.
A lot has been written and said about him. However, despite this, clinical death still continues to remain a secret for a person with seven seals, and experts do not have a consensus on what actually happens to a person at this time. And this is despite the many scientific (and not quite) hypotheses put forward in almost all countries of the world by various specialists.
… In the ears of an elderly man, at whose bedside people in white coats were bustling, some unpleasant noise, an alarming ringing, was growing. Sickness rolled over, through which the doctors' remarks, becoming more and more restless and abrupt, flew into consciousness, and when his vision cleared up, the man was surprised to find that he was standing in the middle of the hospital ward; nearby was a group of doctors busy with some patient, limp limp on his bed and showing no signs of life.
Excited abrupt phrases sounded in the room: experts informed their colleagues that the patient's pressure was dropping, the pulse disappeared, the pupils stopped responding to light, a characteristic pallor appeared …
“Hopeless,” one of the resuscitators waved his hand. “Let's try, of course, but hardly …” And the young nurse, who raised the commotion, looked at the dying man with eyes widening with fear.
Her older colleague furtively crossed herself, sighed heavily: "Exhausted, poor fellow …" Observing the desperate attempts of doctors to revive the dying man, the man came closer and suddenly stared dazedly at the face of the lying man.
It was … himself! Feverishly looking around, the man rushed to those present in the ward and tried to attract their attention. But in vain: no one reacted to his voice, and a hand passed over the shoulder of the chief doctor, whom the patient wanted to force to turn around. The man decided to look at his watch, but then disappointment awaited him again: the pajamas, in whose pocket they were, remained on the lying body …
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And then he felt very calm. What, in fact, is the difference, what time is it now? So what if they don't see and hear him? "So I really died?" - the man thought with surprise. And this is what he was so afraid of all the long months, being chained to a hospital bed? Well, while everything is not so bad … Then the patient saw a long dark tunnel open in front of him, somewhere at the end of which a bright light dawned, and felt: they were waiting for him. In the next instant, the dying man was sucked into the tunnel, and he flew, increasing speed, forward. To the light.
His whole life flashed before his eyes, like on a movie screen. Here the dizzying slide became slower, but the mood continued to be excellent. Still would! For the first time in a long time, nothing hurt him, nothing bothered him. On the contrary, the confidence grew that everything that was happening was not a dream at all, but a reality and that now, finally, everything would be fine. After all, he is returning home …
Then the man stopped and saw an amazing landscape in front of him, which was interfered with by streams of strong, but not cutting eyes, but some kind of friendly light. There is only one step left to be there in this strange world. But on the threshold of the twilight tunnel, at the very BORDER of light, a brightly luminous figure suddenly appeared, which shook its head negatively and resolutely blocked his path. “Not the time,” the words swept through my mind with a light breath of wind. And at that moment, the man felt so offended and bad, as, perhaps, not once during the entire illness. Why?! Why don't they want to let him go forward? And now what i can do?
The luminous silhouette swayed, letting someone forward, and he, already almost not surprised at anything, recognized in the man who appeared his own wife, who had died three years ago. The woman smiled and cried at the same time. Yes, she is very glad to see him, she is very bored and is waiting, but … "It's not time yet … You can't come here … Come back!"
"But I dont want! the man protested resolutely. - I came to you!" - "Not now. Your life is not over yet. Who will tell me about a great-grandson who will be born soon? " The woman went up to her husband and gently touched his cheek with a warm hand: “Don't worry, I'll wait. Come back. Everything will be fine…"
And again the feeling of flight, and the spot of light becomes smaller and smaller. And another light dawns ahead - the cold, indifferent light of the lamps in the operating room. Here he again stands at his own body, bending over it. It's getting really bad. Is it really necessary to return? Nausea rolled over again, and when the man opened his eyes again, he saw a doctor in front of him. “You scared us. It's nothing, everything will be all right…"
And someone aside said: “Five minutes. Well this is necessary - at the last moment it turned out! I already thought - that's it …”The patient closed his eyelids; bitterness remained inside, but at the same time confidence grew: he would scramble out and live a long time, and would take his great-grandson to the zoo, and ride a bicycle with him, and teach him to read … How many things are ahead! And life, in general, is a good thing, and although death, it turns out, is not so scary, it is clearly not worth rushing to say goodbye to this world …
A familiar picture, isn't it? It is in this vein (with minor changes) that those people who happened to be "beyond the line", that is, survive clinical death and return back to the world of the living, describe their feelings and visions. Why are the pictures seen by those who have preserved their memories of being "in the next world" so similar? What makes people of different ages, gender, nationality, beliefs experience almost the same sensations?
Science has been struggling to answer these questions for a long time. It would seem that the solution to our posthumous existence is close - literally at arm's length. But again and again, among the explained facts, one or two are cluttered, which again make humanity believe that “we, having given up our ends, do not die for good” …
Science calls clinical death a terminal (borderline) state, the last stage of dying. In fact, this state is not actually death, although it also has nothing to do with life.
In a biological sense, clinical death is somewhat similar (but not identical!) To anabiosis and is a reversible state; with it there are no visible signs of life, the functions of the central nervous system fade away, but metabolic processes in the tissues are preserved. So the very fact of cessation of breathing, lack of blood circulation and heartbeat, lack of reaction of the pupil to light - the main signs of clinical death - cannot be regarded as the end of life.
Thanks to the achievements of medicine, even in this case, a person has a chance to “replay everything anew” and return to normal life. However, doctors have very little time at their disposal in this situation. If resuscitation measures were unsuccessful (or were not carried out at all), the termination of physiological processes in cells and tissues becomes irreversible. That is, biological, or true, death occurs.
In general, the duration of the period when a patient in a state of clinical death can be “pulled out of the other world” is determined by the period during which the upper parts of the brain, which include the subcortex and cortex, remain viable in the absence of oxygen. Usually in the special literature it is written that this period of time is only five to six minutes (if the dying man's heart managed to "start" within two to three minutes, he will return to life, as a rule, without any problems).
But from time to time doctors have to deal with amazing cases when the patient was able to "resurrect" and after a much longer stay "on the other side". It turned out that the subcortex and bark finally die after the specified time only under the so-called conditions of normothermia.
True, even then, the deceased can sometimes be pulled out of the clutches of death, but when the specified period is exceeded, changes occur in the brain tissue - often irreversible, which lead to various intellectual impairments.
And if in some cases, through the joint efforts of specialists in different fields, including neuropathologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, it is possible to restore the patient's usefulness, then most often doctors can only helplessly shrug their hands: the god of death Thanatos does not like joking and “his” clients are very reluctant to let go … In addition, people who have been in a state of clinical death for more than five minutes usually rarely live longer than a few months and soon say goodbye to our world forever.
As for the longer term of "incomplete death", then doctors have to deal with it mainly in special conditions. Then the time allotted by fate for resuscitation measures fluctuates within significant limits and can be tens of minutes.
This becomes possible when special conditions are created to slow down the processes of degeneration of the higher parts of the brain during hypoxia or anoxia. They usually occur when patients are injured by electric shock, drowning, or under conditions of hypothermia (a significant decrease in the temperature of the environment in which the victim is located).
So, a few years ago, Norwegian specialists managed to bring back to life a boy who fell into an ice hole and was pulled out from under the ice only after 40 minutes. It was hypothermia, which developed when exposed to very cold water, that allowed the brain cells of a small patient to maintain their viability almost 10 times longer than under conditions of normothermia. It is noteworthy that in this case, the doctors completely restored all vital functions of the victim's body and no changes in the brain were noted.
In clinical practice, physicians sometimes manage to create a semblance of the aforementioned "shock conditions". To increase the period during which resuscitation measures can have a positive result, they use hypothermia of the head, hyperbaric oxygenation, transfusions of fresh (not canned) donor blood, use drugs that create a state similar to suspended animation, etc. Sometimes the result of the actions of doctors generally resembles a science fiction novel.
Thus, the Serb Lubomir Cebich, who had suffered a severe heart attack, was brought back to life by doctors … 17 times within two days! Medicine has not yet known such a number of "resurrections". And A. Efremov, a pensioner from Novosibirsk, became a unique case: a man who received extensive burns had a heart failure during one of the skin transplants.
The doctors managed to get him out of the state of clinical death only after … 35 minutes! It is characteristic that the resuscitation team decided not to stop active actions after the "standard" period expired and continued to fight for the patient's life. After Efremov's "return" it turned out that for some reason no irreversible changes in the pensioner's brain had occurred …
Official medicine has its own view of the visions of patients who have experienced clinical death brought back to life. In recent years, a well-founded explanation has been found for most of the feelings of the "resurrected". For example, it is especially common among the reanimated to see a long dark tunnel with a blinding light at the end of it and fly towards that light.
Experts say that the reason for this is the so-called "tubular" or "tunnel" vision, which occurs due to hypoxia of the occipital cortex. According to neuroscientists, the vision of the tunnel and the sensation of dizzying flight through the pipe in dying people occur when the cells of these areas, which are responsible for processing visual information, begin to die from lack of oxygen.
At this time, excitation waves - concentric circles - appear in the so-called visual cortex. And if the cortex of the occipital lobes has already suffered from hypoxia, then the pole of the same lobes, where there is an overlap zone, continues to live. As a result, the field of view is sharply narrowed, and only a narrow band remains, which provides only central, "tubular" vision.
In combination with excitation waves, this gives the picture of flight through a dark tunnel. In the late 90s of the last century, researchers from the University of Bristol were able to simulate the process of dying of visual cells in the brain on a computer. It was found that at this moment a picture of a moving tunnel appears in the mind of a person every time.
True, there is another opinion. For example, the Russian resuscitator Nikolai Gubin and the American doctor E. Roudin believe that the tunnel is a consequence of toxic psychosis. And a number of psychologists seriously believe that a strange "tunnel" is nothing more than … a person's memory of his birth.
Now about the pictures of the lived life, sweeping before the eyes of the dying. Apparently, the "shutdown" process begins with newer brain structures and ends with older ones. When "revitalizing", the restoration of functions goes in the reverse order.
That is, the older parts of the cerebral cortex first come to life, and then the new ones. That is why in the memory of a person who has suffered clinical death, when returning to life, the most persistently imprinted moments first emerge.
Doctors believe that other strange conditions with clinical death can be explained quite scientifically. Let's take the so-called exit from the body, when the patient sees his body and the specialists scurrying around it as if from the outside.
A couple of years ago, it was found that the source of such a strange sensation could be one of the convolutions in the right side of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for collecting information that comes from different parts of the brain. This gyrus just forms a person's idea of where his body is. When signals fail, the brain paints a distorted picture, and the person sees himself as if from the outside.
Now about why, in case of clinical death, many patients continue to hear what others are talking about. In resuscitation practice, the cortical hearing analyzer is considered the most resistant. Since the fibers of the auditory nerve branch quite widely, switching off one or more bundles of such fibers does not lead to hearing loss.
So a patient who is already beyond the line of death (still reversible) is quite capable of hearing what is happening around him, and, returning from the other world, remember what the doctors were talking about in his body. That is why in many clinics around the world, the medical staff is forbidden to express a judgment about the hopeless state of a dying person, who can no longer react to what is happening, but still perceives what has been said to some extent.
In December 2001, three Dutch scientists from Rijenstate Hospital conducted the largest study to date of clinical deaths. Dutch scientists came to the following conclusions. Based on statistical data obtained over a ten-year period, scientists have established that not every person who has experienced clinical death visits visions.
Only 18% of the reanimated retained clear memories of what they experienced in the period between temporary death and "resurrection". Most of the patients talked not only about flying through the tunnel to the light, a series of pictures of a past life and a "look from the outside", but also about meetings with long-dead relatives, a certain luminous creature, pictures of an alien landscape, the border between the worlds of the living and the dead, a dazzling flash Sveta.
During the period of clinical death, more than half of the surveyed experienced positive emotions. Awareness of the fact of their own death was noted in 50% of cases. And at the same time, none of those who visited the other world reported frightening or unpleasant sensations! On the contrary, practically all those who have been “beyond the line” have a strange picture of a change in their attitude to the issues of life and death.
“Resurrected” cease to be afraid of death, talk about the feeling of their relative invulnerability and, at the same time, begin to value life more, realize its enormous value, and perceive their salvation as a gift from God or fate.
So, it is clearly too early to put an end to studies of the phenomenon of clinical death. Of course, much can be explained from a purely materialistic point of view, but some of the "oddities" of the state of the "resurrected" still defy explanation. For example, why do people who are blind from birth repeat literally word for word the stories of the sighted?
But what about the fact that the weight of patients changes when they die and return to life? Resuscitators admit that a person's body weight changes by 60-80 g during agony. Attempts to attribute this "loss" to chemical reactions ("complete combustion of ATP and depletion of cellular stores") do not stand up to criticism, since as a result of any chemical reactions, products are formed that must somehow leave the body.
The burning of ATP and the depletion of cellular resources are not nuclear reactions, when part of the mass of reagents goes into radiation energy! If during these chemical reactions gases are formed whose density is comparable to that of air, then 60-80 g is approximately 45-60 dm3.
For comparison: the average volume of human lungs is about 1 dm3. Liquid and solid products of an agonizing body can hardly leave it unnoticed … So where do the mentioned grams go, and where do they come from again when the patient returns to life?
Today, many scientists are inclined to believe that after the physical death of a person, his consciousness is preserved. According to one of the leading doctors at Southampton Hospital, Sam Parney and his colleagues, the mind, or soul, continues to think and reflect, "even if the patient's heart stops, he does not breathe, and the brain stops working."
Natalia Bekhtereva, an expert in the field of human brain physiology, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, did not doubt the continuation of life in some form. Currently, scientists are increasingly saying that they have come close to the scientific substantiation of the immortality of the soul …
But a person has not yet been able to either confirm or refute the arguments of both supporters of the theory of "life after death" and its opponents. After all, whatever one may say, clinical death is not yet final death, and because of the features of the latter, no one has yet returned … So you and I have to believe in the theory that is closer to our own worldview, and try to realize: death is just a transfer station on the border of two worlds …