People who have had a conscious near-death experience have a ‘return to body’ feeling.
What happens after death? Darkness, cessation of pain, light and a sense of calm are some of the descriptions that the human imagination has conjured up as the post-death landscape.
However, a recent extraordinary scientific study claims that consciousness does not die immediately when the human heart stops beating.
According to research conducted at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in the US, one in five people who survive a heart attack will have a near-death experience in which the person apparently does not have a heart. He is throbbing and unconscious.
According to Sam Perina, the director of the research, ‘death has historically been seen as a line that, once crossed, there is no going back.’
According to him, this concept has been questioned for the last 60 years. According to him, the reason for this was the invention of the ‘cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ (CPR) process.
This method is used to provide emergency medical support to a victim after a heart attack, which has made it possible to bring people who have entered the death stage back to life.
He says that there are millions of near-death experiencers who have reported their experiences, but these experiences have been attributed to the effects of drugs or delusions. According to this recent study, this comparison is not correct.
The study looked at 567 people who received CPR after cardiac arrest in the UK and US from 2017 to 2022, and only 10% of them survived.
Sam Perina says, “It has to be understood that a heart attack is not only a problem related to the heart. It is just a medical term.
The study also included 85 people whose brains were monitored using the process of ‘cerebral oximetry’. The process involved monitoring oxygen fluctuations in the brain, but it was not easy to do.
According to Sam Perina, “A heart attack is an emergency in which everything happens suddenly. The team has to arrive within five minutes to install the equipment. It was very difficult to collect data in this work.
Experiments in animals showed an increase in electrical activity in their brains at the time of death.
Another study in February that examined the brains of a woman at the time of death showed an increase in gamma activity in the brain. This happens when a person is trying to explore old memories.
Against this backdrop, Sam Perina’s team wanted to find answers to two questions. The first is what the human experience is when the heart stops beating and the second is an examination of claims in which people claimed that they had a conscious experience of death but did not die.
However, according to him, the term ‘coming back to life’ has been misused because such experiences have nothing to do with death, but are two different experiences.
He believes that some people use this term to refer to dreams. Some do it because of drugs. “But for us it was really a near-death experience. Because the heart had stopped beating in these cases.
Most people who survive CPR are in a coma for days or weeks. Sam Perina’s team divided such people into two groups.
“We found that one group was those who had such experiences when they were coming out of a coma. That is, their experiences were not related to death.
During this study, they also ruled out the possibility that this experience is similar to dreaming.
They say that everyone dreams differently, but people who have had a near-death experience, who don’t know each other, share five things.
‘These include the analysis of life, the feeling of separation from the body, then the return of a feeling to the body, the feeling of traveling towards a destination and then the feeling of returning home.’
“We were able to determine that the near-death experience is not a dream or a hallucination.”
In the second phase of the research, the level of conscious awareness was measured using a brain monitor.
They found that up to an hour after CPR, there were signs of rapid brain activity—alpha, beta, delta, and gamma brain waves.
“These waves are seen when a person is consciously thinking about something, analyzing something, when you are combing through memories,” said Sam Perina. So we showed evidence of a conscious experience of death through brain markers.’
In reality, not everyone who goes through this experience remembers what happened to them or what happened to them during that time, but that does not mean that they did not experience it.
A person may forget such experiences due to brain swelling caused by sedatives, coma and arteriosclerosis.
Sam Perina says that 100% of people can’t tell everything. It has to do with everyone’s mental state and the drugs they are given.
He said that 39 percent of the people involved in the research remembered a few vague things but could not describe them in detail, while 20 percent felt a transcendental state. Seven percent remembered hearing something while three percent experienced seeing something.
Among those who remembered this condition, its duration was not clear. Sam Perina says that this situation is possible for a few seconds
“I felt like I was being pushed back into my body,” said another.
“I felt like someone was with me, it was a calming feeling but there was also a sense of power attached to this presence,” one person described.
Some people described that they felt like leaving for a destination and then returning home.
“It wasn’t that I was in a tunnel, but the speed at which I was traveling created a tunnel around me,” said one person.
I went through this tunnel very fast. It was a great feeling and I didn’t want to come back. I knew I had reached home.
These different styles of expression were interesting to Sam Perina. He says that while we are alive we remember only one percent of our life. Interestingly, those near death remembered everything even though their brains were shutting down.
He says that it does not happen as it is shown in media or movies. It is an in-depth life analysis that reflects on one’s actions and thoughts.
“They evaluate their lives, measure their actions on a moral scale, which is very unusual.” And all this is happening while they are going through the process of physical death. And therefore it cannot be called delusion.
People in this study said that when they remembered a time when they had hurt someone, they felt very bad. But the people he brought happiness to, he also felt happiness.
Preena says that we usually don’t analyze our lives that deeply because it feels too overwhelming to do so.
“What’s interesting is that it’s really a death-like experience and we’re learning more about it by looking at it under scientific principles,” he says.
He said, “When someone dies suddenly, all the things that matter, like paying bills, loans, food, jobs, all disappear because they don’t matter.” What remains in the mind is how we behaved as humans. Our morals, and everything we’ve done in life, is remembered and that’s really amazing.”
