It's been pretty well established that your brain shuts down within a few minutes after your heart stops beating. You are now clinically dead. But in the largest such scientific study ever conducted, which included over 2000 subjects at 15 hospitals in three countries and spanning four years, it's been determined that awareness continues for some time even after you're dead.
According to their report, published in the journal, Resuscitation, some 40% of patients successfully resuscitated following clinical death reported awareness, with one man in particular describing watching from a corner of the room as medics worked to bring him back:
“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.
“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”
Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.
And in some cases, he speculates, brain injury may impair recall. In any event, these results are...unexpected, shall we say. Interestingly, the experiences of the dead were not uniform; some reported out-of-body experiences similar to that describe above, while others reported seeing the sun shining, and yet others reported that time seemed to slow down.
From experience, I find the latter quite credible, as I survived an event that generally carries a survival rate of 2%, and time very definitely seemed to slow down; I had plenty of time to formulate an exit strategy, although to others at the scene, everything took place in a minute. It seems inexplicable, but I felt that I had plenty of time to consider the possible outcomes of various approaches to extrication and to select the one that seemed most likely to succeed. Either time slowed down, or my processing speed surged.
The which doesn't matter; surviving stupidity that takes out 98% of people does. And I'm glad that I was granted the extra time.
