Chilling new research has found that you know when you are dead – and you are likely to know what is happening around you.
The study by researchers led by Dr Sam Parnia states that a person’s consciousness keeps working after their heart stops beating. Essentially, they are “trapped inside their dead body with the brain still functioning if only for a short time”.
The study revealed that the idea of an afterlife presented by cardiac arrest survivors who momentarily die is actually an illusion caused by the fact that they were aware of what was going on around them while they were dead.
More than 2,000 persons who suffered a cardiac arrest and responded to resuscitation treatment were interviewed in 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria in the largest stud of its kind to date. Methodology was rigorous to exclude cases that held no scientific interest.
Dr Parnia is head of a multidisciplinary team at Southampton University (United Kingdom) who published a study in the Oficial Journal of European Resuscitation Council, with the title “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study”.
