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A tunnel with light at the end. Your life flashes before your eyes. The language of “near-death experience” has become completely banal – and yet scientists still know almost nothing about what happens in the brain when a person is just seconds away from the end of his life.
Now, a new study appears to provide important information about this mysterious phenomenon. The headlines accompanying the article could give the impression of a major breakthrough – not least in New York Postwhich described an “astonishing” new study and concluded: “There is life after death” (!).
There are two separate phenomena here. The more “ordinary” of the two – although it seems anything but ordinary to those who experience it – is the near-death experience. This is the phenomenon of moving towards the light, meeting deceased relatives, re-evaluating one’s past or having some other deep experience when the body is in a very unstable state.
The second one is worse. This is an “out-of-body experience.” Countless books on spiritual and paranormal themes contain stories of people waking up after near-death resuscitation and mentioning details about medical procedures or other aspects of the room or hospital that they could only know if they were there at the time. . Yet their hearts stopped beating, their breathing stopped, and they were considered clinically dead.
Life after death?
Perhaps the most famous story: an American woman reported that during resuscitation she was so far away from her body that she saw a tennis shoe on the windowsill outside the hospital. When we checked, the shoes were indeed there.
The new study was an attempt to go beyond anecdotes and collect useful data about both types of experiences. Sam Parnia, a medical scientist at Langone Medical Center in New York, has agreed with 25 different hospitals in the US and UK to perform a special procedure when a heart attack patient is resuscitated in the intensive care unit (British hospitals include The Royal). . London Hospital, Southampton General Hospital and Heartlands Hospital Birmingham).
567 patients included; only 53 survived discharge, indicating how serious their condition was and supporting the assumption that they were indeed “near death”.
Survivors were interviewed as soon as possible after resuscitation and described their experiences while unconscious. This led to an interesting series of dream-like stories, including one about a patient who met his grandmother and was told to “go back” and a patient who had an even more frightening experience involving “demons and monsters… trying to get out of the rut.” away.” “. [their] Body parts”.
More important to the scientific question, however, is what Parnia’s team did during the revival. First, they monitored the brainwaves of a small number of participants (in a way that would not interfere with resuscitation) and found that many of them, even those who later died, had “almost normal” brainwave patterns. sometimes even late in the process. To the researchers, this meant that even if someone had lost outward signs of consciousness, they could still experience something.
Parnia’s team also tried to provide patients with an objective experience. They put on headphones and every few minutes a voice played the words “apple, pear, banana.”
But we’re not talking about the “outer body” part – and that’s where Parnia came up with a brilliant (or perhaps, from your point of view, ridiculous) idea. For each patient, Parnia’s team mounted an iPad high above the ICU table, facing the ceiling. One of 10 randomly selected images was shown on the screen. The patient could only see the photograph while it was hovering over his body – in other words, it was an attempt to recreate the history of the “tennis shoe”, but under much more controlled conditions.
Inconclusive evidence
What did they find? No patient remembered hearing words through the headphones, and no one remembered seeing the image on the iPad. When guessing, no one was able to choose the correct picture, and only one of the 28 survivors who were given headphones chose “apple, pear, banana” from a selection of words. This could be explained by pure luck and not by them hearing anything during the procedure.
Even putting aside the more paranormal aspects of the study, doctors are interested in whether patients continue to show brain activity after resuscitation. First, it could mean that some people who were once thought to no longer have brain activity will be saved. , there is still a chance to return to life. .
But even after this huge effort by the Parnia team, we still have a very small number of observations. The parts with headphones and iPad are only a small excerpt and certainly do not contain conclusive evidence of paranormal aspects. If a significant number of patients remembered the correct iPad image, those of us who don’t believe in immaterial souls would have a lot of explaining to do.
It’s unclear whether Parnia will reconsider his views in light of his new research, which in the past has argued that studies of near-death experiences show that the mind is somehow separate from the brain.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind in all of these studies is that patients who “come back” and report their experiences are, by definition, so did not die. Therefore, no matter what we learn from research – no matter how ingenious their designs – the actual experience of death remains completely inaccessible to us. Until we inevitably face it ourselves.
Other things I wrote this week
Last week a study appeared in the press showing that vegetarianism is partly genetic. Wow! Or not so “wow”: we have known this for decades, and it should be clear to anyone who has read the behavioral genetics literature. I wrote about this strange episode in which a very boring discovery was reported as a breakthrough.
What makes people happier? There have been decades of low-quality research on this important psychological question. I wrote about a new study that tries to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Science Link of the Week
If you toss a coin, what is the probability that it will land on the same side (heads or tails) as it originally did? Interestingly, the answer does not seem to be exactly 50 percent. An impressive study on this topic has just been published online. arXiv Preprint server.
It’s Science Fiction with Stuart Ritchie, a newsletter exclusively for i-subscribers. If you’d like to receive it straight to your inbox every week, sign up here.
Source: I News
With a background in journalism and a passion for technology, I am an experienced writer and editor. As an author at 24 News Reporter, I specialize in writing about the latest news and developments within the tech industry. My work has been featured on various publications including Wired Magazine and Engadget.