An international team of scientists studied the experiences of people who were on the verge of life and death. The results, according to Medical Xpress, were presented at the American Heart Association Resuscitation Symposium in November this year.
The researchers interviewed 567 people who experienced cardiac arrest followed by cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). All participants in the study spoke about what feelings they experienced. It turned out that they were significantly different from hallucinations and dreams.
In particular, as the study participants said, they experienced a sense of separation of consciousness from the body, and this happened without such side effects as pain or agony, and also evaluated their life, actions, intentions and thoughts in relation to other people.
They were also tested for latent brain activity: they all recorded bursts of activity, including gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves, which lasted up to an hour after resuscitation.
Many of these impulses originate in conscious people involved in complex mental processes such as thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception.
It has been established that on the verge of life and death a person experiences a unique internal conscious experience.
The detected measurable electrical signals of increased brain activity, together with stories of memories of death, suggest that human self-awareness, like other biological functions of the body, probably does not always immediately stop with the onset of death.
At the same time, as the scientists note, more research is needed to more fully determine the biomarkers of a person’s memories of death and monitor the long-term psychological consequences after performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation associated with cardiac arrest.
