No, this isn't going to be a lengthy scientific or philosophical musing on the perennial question: What is the nature of consciousness? I could opine deeply on that, having made somewhat of a life-study of the subject, but will refrain. This is about a doctor, Sam Parnia, who has examined the subject of the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death in some depth...
Parnia has been actively involved in cardiac arrest resuscitation since the late 90s, when he was a member of the Southampton University Trust Hospitals resuscitation committee. One of his areas of concentration has been in the incorporation of cerebral oximetry during cardiac arrest care as a marker of the quality of oxygen delivery to the brain during resuscitation. His research also focuses on the study of the human mind and consciousness during the period after cardiac arrest. This research has included investigation of near-death experiences.
And it's about an organized 6-year study that began in 2008 and involved resuscitation of cardiac arrest patients at 15 hospitals in the UK, United States and Austria. The results have been published in the journal
Resuscitation, publicly available. Edited to get the whole link in - you will need to add the [ http:// ] -
www.resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572(14)00739-4/fulltext
Here's the press blurbs from The University of Southhampton and Science Daily. This study is quite interesting, as the Results clearly state...
Among 2060 CA [Cardiac Arrest] events, 140 survivors completed stage 1 interviews, while 101 of 140 patients completed stage 2 interviews. 46% had memories with 7 major cognitive themes: fear; animals/plants; bright light; violence/persecution; deja-vu; family; recalling events post-CA and 9% had NDEs, while 2% described awareness with explicit recall of 'seeing' and 'hearing' actual events related to their resuscitation. One had a verifiable period of conscious awareness during which time cerebral function was not expected.
This must surely qualify as "waking up dead."
The Conclusions are 3-sentence succinct...
CA survivors commonly experience a broad range of cognitive themes, with 2% exhibiting full awareness. This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness. This together with fearful experiences may contribute to PTSD and other cognitive deficits post CA.
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A note here about the current state of the overall multidisciplinary quest to quantify consciousness that has been going strong for more than a decade and a half: No. They still don't know exactly what consciousness is, precisely how it operates, or its true nature in these physical dimensionalities (or any others).
So things are still pretty wide open, everybody who's anybody has their favorite theoretical scaffolding and those run into the dozens. So thought I'd share the latest news from the quest for those interested.