Are we conscious after death?

Death is the great unknown but researchers are trying to understand what happens to the brain in the afterlife.

Dr Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University, is carrying out a study of Europeans and Americans who had cardiac arrests, technically died, but were later revived.

“In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of love, for instance, we’re trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we’re all going to have when we die,” said Parnia in an interview with Live Science.

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Anecdotal evidence suggests that people whose hearts stop temporarily are subsequently able to give accurate, verified accounts of what was going on, he added.

The “spooky part”, Fortune magazine says, is that some patients may hear and understand doctors’ conversations about them dying before being resuscitated.

A 2014 study of more than 100 resuscitated cardiac arrest patients found that 39% had some awareness of their situation. One felt herself floating above her body as the doctor called “code blue”, says Newsweek.

University of Michigan studies have shown the brain has a “sudden burst” of activity when the body dies, implying that people knows they’ve died before their brain shuts down, according to CBS News.