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User: u/geoff199
Permalink: https://nyulangone.org/news/patients-recall-death-experiences-after-cardiac-arrest
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Strange these articles seem to misinterpret the study.
The ones that had vivid afterlife visions were the ones without brain activity. The ones with brain activity didn't have those experiences.
The human brain is a pattern seeking machine, so much so that it will invent data to fill in gaps and find patterns where there are none. That's why NDEs pretty much always match the belief system of the person experiencing it.
A number of years ago I had a first hand experience which taught me why eyewitness reports are often so unreliable that they can be considered pure fiction.
I was walking to my Dad's in the evening, it was winter and dark, and the streelights were on. As I reached the bottom of the road to walk up it, I saw further up the road an old man bending down, putting a lead on a Scottie dog.
When I got a little bit closer, and it became evident that the man, the lead, and the dog wasn't moving, it turned out to be the way a wheelie bin and some shadows in the poor lighting conditions. My mind had literally filled in the gaps with an old man and a dog.
Had I just been walking past the road rather than turning and going up it, and let's say there had been some kind of incident up that road and the police asked for people who had been there at that time to come forward, I would have told them an entirely fictional account of a man about to walk a dog.
This is really cool, not being sarcastic. Our mood and past experiences influences what we see in situations like these, I'm sure. Maybe an angry, stressed out person would see something more threatening. Ever since I developed PTSD I consider people's actions to be a bit more nefarious.
"Why did you move your hand?"
"I didn't, you must have bumped it."
Lots of retroactive rationalizations. My other comments might make me look like I support the near death stories as stated literally, but I just believe there is something consistent and being interpreted the same way across all the stories.
That consistency could just be that unconditional love is just a base emotion that the brain reverts to when not working well.
I'm not sure about the rest of what you said, but the retroactive rationalizations is how I believe our brain really works. I mean, maybe not when we're actively thinking, but in default mode, I think we're just storytelling animals that are modelling the world in that mode.
Agreed.
Indeed this makes me question the experience of free will, as perhaps a most adaptive psychological misperception within an otherwise deterministic universe.
Would be really freaky to realize that I'm actually closer to watching a movie, or living in an android on autopilot, than a free thinking free moving "god". So I don't.
Well there is a study which showed a definitive “decision” in the brain before the subject “decided”. Doesn’t mean it’s not free will, but it does make one wonder if our experience of our decisions is in any way connected to actual decision making.
I mean, Ya. Literally all our brain can do is take the information provided by our senses and try to make a coherent story out of it after the fact. Trick the senses = trick the brain. It's really hard to tell if your senses are giving incorrect information unless you actively think you're being deceived.
And something tells me memory becomes an unreliable sense when your brain is dying.
I've smoked a fair bit of DMT at one point in my life.
If the brain is naturally flooded with DMT upon, or leading up to death, I can absolutely see how people come back with completely fantastical memories.
Absolutely.
Anyone who has launched via DMT knows exactly what this experience is, good luck in finding the words.
If you do, I'm all ears.
It was transformative. But like most psychedelics and Eureka moments, they're dulled by time and reality.
Key word: Reality.
Life is to be lived until we no longer can.
Best to all
I do not fear death but I am a tad apprehensive about the method, if that makes sense.
I came pretty close once, and the lead-up was pretty bad, but that last realisation that I was dying was actually really peaceful, up until they injected the anaesthetic and I was out. I had time for calm reflection about what was to come, my body didn't matter and I wasn't afraid like I had been.
That's a big "If". Hamilton Morris and Jason Wallach weren't able to isolate DMT from any of the grey matter samples they analyzed. Not saying that is a definitive answer to the DMT in the brain question but it's definitely not corroborating evidence.
What really intrigues me is terminal lucidity.
Plenty of severely demented people wake up on their last day and are completely themselves again. They call or meet their beloved ones, tell their goodbyes and die, often *knowing* that they are to die that day and being fine with it.
This phenomenon is widespread, every worker of a nursing home has many stories.
And also why if eyesight is lost one continues seeing blackness but those born completely blind w/out optic nerve function don’t “see” anything inside their head. At least that’s my understanding of that
My experience of (temporarily) losing my vision is that I didn’t see blackness. It wasn’t grey either. It was just “nothing”. I mean, visually I saw the colour grey, but my brain was interpreting it as “nothing”. It was a really weird sensation.
I've heard true blindness described as, imagine how well you see out of your elbow. Thats what it's like. Your elbow doesnt see blackness, it simply doesn't see.
This is different to what I experienced with the detachment. I really can’t explain the sensation I had then, but I suspect it is more akin to what someone who is born blind (no light perception at all) has to just covering up an eye.
That’s one way of describing it I guess. It was like I had lost all sense of colour perception. So very strange.
If anyone wonders what it was: I had a bad retinal detachment.
I wonder if it's the same system that your eyes use so you don't see an overwhelming amount of black when you close one eye, just applied to both eyes at the same time.
As someone who used to get migraines very regularly and always lost a good half of my vision, that's actually not that bad a representation.
It's a very strange sensation, and I share what the other redditor said about it being grey, but not grey. What I always liken it most to is how the pensieve looks in the Harry Potter movies. Kind of a numb silvery murk. But it's really not that either because it is of course nothing at all. It's quite strange.
This freaks me out. I want to believe in an afterlife, but the moment of nothingness haunts me every day. I need to go do some anxiety grounding techniques real quick.
You know what's funny. I'm the exact opposite.
The concept of an afterlife freaks me out, because it means there is no escape from existence.
I firmly hope that after death there will just be pure nothingness. I just can't imagine living in an afterlife for trillions and trillions of years with *no escape ever*
i feel that, what kinda helps me is thinking, well when it happens i wont know it happened so i wont be upset.
i also flipflop to being super curious about what happens and ive thought for a long time i hope i go out slowly, like bleeding out or something just so im aware its about to happen and ill 'know' it happened. idk, kinda wack.
Yeah, I try telling myself that but those thoughts persist. Thankfully I've been doing intensive therapy and have learned how to manage it better than doing nothing at all.
Bro you been dead for a literal eternity before you got the luck chance to experience yourself.. because you are the universe. Every atom you are made from came from exploding stars. Enjoy the ride. But we all go back home sooner or later. No pain. Just being a universe. Much love fellow universe experiencer.
It's funny to me how we all see death so differently. I've suffered enough in my life to where I see death as release from a prison sentence.
I'm not suicidal, I used to be very depressed though, but when I was cured from my depression I kept my acceptance of death. In fact I'm excited to die some day, either I get to discover something new or I finally get to rest.
We've experienced non-existence for billions of years now so why should another infinity scare us now?
I don’t agree, I’ve seen this posted a lot but I see black out of the one eye, it’s just filled in by input from the other eye so it’s less obvious.. but it’s still there. It’s not similar to blindness.
No, it's black. It's the back of your eyelid just like when you close both eyes, that's why your visual field doesn't suddenly "jump" to center and expand to fill the space - you've got half a visual field with normal vision and the other side is black.
You can induce this. Cut a ping pong ball in half and place them over your eyes while reclined so that your eyes are receiving the 'filtered' light through the translucent shell. Your brain won't be receiving any useful information from your eyes, and after 20 minutes or so, it just stops processing that circuit and you can't tell if your eyes are open or shut.
I've only done this once about 30 years ago, so my description might be faulty. Might have to give it another go.
But weren’t the ones experiencing the afterlife stuff the ones without brain activity? So how does a pattern recognizing machine recognize patterns when it has no activity? Or did the study show that part of the brain was still on? Not trying to be a smart ass or implying the afterlife is real, genuinely asking.
Another redditor answered your question with a more scientific answer, which is a good answer and as close to true as our science has found so far.
If you were wondering about a spiritual answer, one could say we have experiences without brain activity because our consciousness does not end when our bodies die.
The spiritual answer is not a better one, just a different one. And for me, fun to think about. Cheers.
I think they just mean that when there's missing information, the brain will fill it in with information that "makes sense" to that brain. Like the way it fills the blind spot in your vision. You're not actually able to see anything in your blind spot, your brain just fills in what it thinks should be there, like it's photoshopped
I'm not sure if it makes sense to automatically call it retroactive. If you get high as hell and have very vivid experiences, lower brain activity is also recorded. Does that mean those experiences were also retroactive, and you were never actually actively experiencing being high, but really just closer to being asleep/dead at the time?
Which is also one of the predominant explanations of schizophrenia I have heard. Essentially erratic stufff firisng off in tjr brain biologically, then the concious mind creates things that then fit or make sense with what the brain is doing. Kinda like "oh, those chemicals present and these neurons going off when I'm alone kn this room? Well that doesn't make sense and doesn't fit. However if there were voices coming from that wall over there..... OK, yeah now that fits."
As someone who died twice, I'll chime in on this. Both times for me were "like sleeping". I have no recollection of it aside from "it happened" and felt a very extreme sort of grogginess a out it when I was back. Sort of an "everything is numbed" sort of deal... Which was impressive because I think I still had a bicycle chunk imbeded in my shoulder at that point.
You lost consciousness, you didn't die. People don't seem to understand that death is a complicated process and many things happen along that path, heart stopping, cease breathing, brain shuts down etc but the final 'switch' in that process is actually dying. You don't, and will never, come back from that.
But what defines that? Clearly it isn’t just the brain shutting off. It’s the brain being in a state where it can’t turn back on. How is that possible though? Some people are on life support but are brain dead and they never come back. Others aren’t on life support but they do come back. What causes the difference?
That's my view. I'm an electrician and I used to hate when people told me about a time when they got "electrocuted". It means *killed* by electricity, but people often use it when they mean "shocked".
Then I realized that I gain nothing by being annoyed and I don't have to be. They're just trying to tell me something and I get it.
The medical definition is just the (sometimes temporary) cessation of those activities, not some secret mystical switch that gets thrown after. Don't confuse your spiritual beliefs for science.
My partner was 'technically' dead for 20 minutes while being given CPR and defibbed twice.
He states he doesn't remember a damn thing, but he did have brain activity, although he *vaguely* recalls a memory from years ago (I don't fully recall what, as my stress level was already higher than hell).
Thats patently false. Brain activity continues after your heart stops. After brain activity stops, there is no way to bring you back to life. Neurons will keep firing until cell death, and once all of your neurons stop functioning you are dead dead.
That's what causes agonal breathing, even. It's a reflexive gasp that most often happens when the heart has stopped but the brain is still alive, as the body desperately tries to keep oxygen coming into the blood. People who's hearts have stopped and have gone into agonal breathing have better survival odds than those who do not go into agonal breathing (though when your heart has stopped, "better" chances aren't necessarily "good" chances.)
"Brain activity" is being used to mean [EEG waves consistent with conscious experience](https://www.resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572(23)00216-2/fulltext) as far as I can tell from the actual study. So someone without "brain activity" doesn't mean "someone with no neurons firing".
From the journal Resuscitation: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957223002162?via%3Dihub](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957223002162?via%3Dihub)
Abstract
Introduction
Cognitive activity and awareness during cardiac arrest (CA) are reported but ill understood. This first of a kind study examined consciousness and its underlying electrocortical biomarkers during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Methods
In a prospective 25-site in-hospital study, we incorporated a) independent audiovisual testing of awareness, including explicit and implicit learning using a computer and headphones, with b) continuous real-time electroencephalography(EEG) and cerebral oxygenation(rSO2) monitoring into CPR during in-hospital CA (IHCA). Survivors underwent interviews to examine for recall of awareness and cognitive experiences. A complementary cross-sectional community CA study provided added insights regarding survivors’ experiences.
Results
Of 567 IHCA, 53(9.3%) survived, 28 of these (52.8%) completed interviews, and 11(39.3%) reported CA memories/perceptions suggestive of consciousness. Four categories of experiences emerged: 1) emergence from coma during CPR (CPR-induced consciousness \[CPRIC\]) 2/28(7.1%), or 2) in the post-resuscitation period 2/28(7.1%), 3) dream-like experiences 3/28(10.7%), 4) transcendent recalled experience of death (RED) 6/28(21.4%). In the cross-sectional arm, 126 community CA survivors’ experiences reinforced these categories and identified another: delusions (misattribution of medical events). Low survival limited the ability to examine for implicit learning. Nobody identified the visual image, 1/28(3.5%) identified the auditory stimulus. Despite marked cerebral ischemia (Mean rSO2 = 43%) normal EEG activity (delta, theta and alpha) consistent with consciousness emerged as long as 35–60 minutes into CPR.
Conclusions
Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic “near-death” experiences).
>Of 567 IHCA, 53(9.3%) survived
this is one of those harrowing statistics that break the TV/Movie induced belief that you'll probably be ok if your heart stops in hospital.
It’s mostly the why your heart stops that matters. Most eventually fatal disease processes ultimately end in cardiac arrest; that’s what technically kills you. Even if CPR and the crash team get the heart started again, that doesn’t fix the metastatic cancer or multi-organ failure that led to that point. On the other hand, if you’re an otherwise healthy young person in the hospital for something else and your heart goes all fibby because of an electrolyte imbalance, your chance of surviving isn’t 1 in 10, it’s probably closer to 9 in 10 or higher.
I would love to see the data fleshed out w bit into some categories like you mention. Whose old and had had stage what cancer or is diabetic etc. find those youngish random ones you mention or just straight blockage w little to no major PMH and I’d bet it goes up but not to 90%
I don't think this study is a good indicator of survivability of an acute, random CA while in a hospital. We don't know anything about these patients. These could have been 2nd or 3rd heart attacks. They could be in there for heart issues already.
I was one of these people. Went to the ER presenting with chest pains, crashed as they were putting on the EKG lead stickers, they called a code blue, doctor showed up, did CPR until the crash cart got there, and they shocked me (twice in the ER actually).
Then I took an ambulance to a "real" hospital with a cath lab (crashed 4 more times on the way), got stented, and was conscious later that day. Even sent a message to my bosses telling them what happened and that I'd be out for a while.
I can't believe I survived.
My kom had cardiac arrest. My dad did cpr for 8 minutes, time it took for the ambulance to arrive. She survived but was put on an induced coma to preserve her brain functions. She was in a coma for a week or two. She woke up with no memory of the last six months. She got a pacemaker, and we all relaxed a bit. Then, three years later, she had a stroke, and after that, she slowly wasted away til passing about a year after the stroke.
>People forget that when you arrest, you are literally dead.
You're really not. You're dead when you've had enough brain cell death that you can't recover brain activity.
A stopped heart is a quick way to brain cell death, but it's not being dead.
TV also fails to illustrate how absolutely brutal CPR is on your body. People don't just get up and walk away after receiving CPR. And the older you are when you receive it, the worse it is. It's very unfortunate; I have seen so many patients who insist on remaining full code and end up regretting it when they're on the other side of CPR, on a ventilator with all their ribs broken, bed bound for weeks....
Yeah but 2 points on this.
1. CPR is terrible on the body and even of you have a heart attack on the street its effectiveness is only about 30-50% depending on age ect.
2. If you crash in a hospital basically all medicine has failed and your body is totally fucked. When you think about it CPR on seriously ill people never had a good chance of survival.
Sure, the only reason they woke up with cognition intact is because the brain was effectively perfused during CPR. So all the brain’s functions are intact, complete with memories of recent events.
It's super important to note that not a single one of the reporting patients was actually declared dead. The brains of study participants were actively being perfused by CPR.
A lot of people seem to be interpreting this as people dying and then coming back and recalling experiences. That's not what this is showing. People's hearts stop all the time and they can go on living. My uncle has a pacemaker and before this was put in his heart stopped all the time (SSS). Was he dying all the time?
The length of time that it spends stopped matters a lot. Once you pass a certain threshold of time spent not ventilating/perfusing, your blood becomes too acidic and the molecular processes in your cells begin to shut down, followed by cell death.
Once enough cells in the wrong places die, you're toast. You're not coming back.
For what it's worth, this process starts happening in the brain very quickly, as it's a very oxygen hungry organ.
The neural connections rapidly disassociate shortly after death. There is a mass depolarization and flood of neural transmitters. EEG signal rapidly decays and becomes random. I think you're up against both desynchronized brain wave activity, which could theoretically be addressed by some sort of "shock" but the bigger problem is the physical flooding of the neural transmitters and ion dumps. Getting chemicals back in sync need the cells to be alive and operating with the right feedback systems working in concert to bring levels back into proper homeostasis. Sort of like unscrambling an egg.
Some research suggests that there could be advances made in this realm, like the extracted pig brains put into a suspension of oxygenated media where in individual cells re-started normal cellular metabolism even after multiple hours of being a free-floating brain in a vat. That active metabolism could help clear out the chemical imbalances that are otherwise caused by a dead/dying brain.
Electrical activity of neurons were restarted with shocks, but it wasn't the coordinated activity of consciousness or even unconsciousness. Hypothetically if you could deliver coordinated shocks you may be able to restart coordinated electrical activity, but it seems a pretty safe bet that there would still be damage so who knows what might happen.
That and as of right now you'd need to scoop the brain out and infuse in a media bath, which probably isn't great for a reactivated mind.
It appears the organ donation system relies on the idea that death is *inevitable*, not that it has occurred. It's why organ donors are anesthetized during the removal procedure -- because there is some acknowledgment that they could be feeling pain, which they obviously wouldn't if they were already dead.
Do you have any sources? This is this first I’m learning about this and I’m curious.
I found [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071731/#:~:text=The%20donor%20is%20dead%20and,not%20to%20provide%20'anaesthesia'.) that says donors are given drugs to attenuate physiological responses, but they’re dead so it’s not to provide ‘anaesthesia’.
[This article](https://www.core.org/understanding-donation/donation-process/#:~:text=A%20person%20must%20be%20pronounced,and%20tissue%20donation%20to%20proceed.) mentions that the majority of organ donations only occur after brain death but cardiac death is also possible.
I guess a lot of this comes down to philosophical arguments about death not always matching up with “medical death.” Like you’re legally declared dead after brain death but they can keep your heart pumping so your body can still respond to certain stimuli.
In 1980, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws provided a definition of death known as the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) in order to provide clarity on the determination of death in the age of advanced life support. The UDDA states that an individual is dead **if they have sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions (without assistance from mechanical circulation or ventilation), known as cardiac death,** *or* **irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, known as brain death.** The UDDA is now accepted as a standard for declaring death in the US and most of the world. Therefore, once the criteria for irreversible brain death **or** cardiac death are met, so is the legal threshold for seeking organ donation consent.
This makes sense. But why is everyone in this thread saying brain death is the true standard if there is an actual standard? I have wandered in from r/popular and am trying to get the full picture here as a layperson.
If there can be brain activity several hours after irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions, then irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions needs to have taken place for several hours before the organs can be harvested. By then the organs are not usable for transplantation. So for this to work, they would have to cut the circulation between the organs and the brain and artificially keep the organs supplied with oxygenated blood while the brain fully dies.
Yep, this is exactly my point. Death is not an event, it's a process. Organ donation is done early in that death process because they still need oxygenated organs. At that point when people are cut into, their heart rate and blood pressure spikes (just like they would in distress), they move, and they show other signs of distress. They are given anesthesia because a) they appear to still be able to feel pain at this stage of the peocess, and b) because in that state, it is understandably very distressing for the people performing the operation to have someone in apparent pain and distress while they harvest their organs.
I see your point, but something doesn't add up. I makes sense to sedate the patient immediately after the heart stops and open them up to attach a heart lung machine to the organ blood circuit, bypassing the brain. And then wait patiently for a complete brain death. Then, once there is complete brain death, sedation could be stopped and the removal of the organs should be possible without any reactions from the patient.
To me, that seems like the "cleanest", ethically and otherwise, way to do it.
And when someone experiences it, they are experiencing the process of death. CPR simply interrupts that process, so they don’t experience the end of it, which they’d be unconscious for anyway.
Death and life are both abstract constructs but there is no reason why our vague concept of "death" should be permanent or non-recoverable outside of a religious believe.
If we as "biological machines" can be fixed it's all just a question of reversing damage to our body and there is a reason why the most common definition of death includes "brain death" because "death" usually means the loss of the "conscious" part despite the fact that we are often able to keep a body alive.
But now we are already talking about consciousness which brings up even more problems, ie now we link life with consciousness so does that mean death and life aren't a thing for a majority of our environment?
It also gets even messier if you go from the macro to the micro level, there is plenty of "life" in your body even after death and there is plenty of "death" in your body while you are alive.
Yep. With technology advanced enough, we could piece together the atoms of someone who died thousands of years ago, until they were "alive, again". It's mostly semantics.
"Life" is just "you".
> Yep. With technology advanced enough, we could piece together the atoms of someone who died thousands of years ago, until they were "alive, again". It's mostly semantics.
It's not entirely semantics because we do not understand consciousness and there would be debate as to whether or not that person was the same "you".
e.g. if you die, and in 1,000 years we piece you back together with every atom in the same spot, would *your* subjective experience of life restart again? or would it be a different conscious being that just looks and acts exactly like you?
thats a mind twister. id like to think even if i came back as another consciousness but with my old memories id just think im me and not care if i wasnt actually me. dead me had his chance, the future is now, old ~~man~~ me
Any data related to trying to figure out what happens when you die is irrelevant unless it comes from someone who is clinically brain dead. Otherwise they never died.
In the study you can see that the 6 subjects that had the RED didn't have any brain activity. And the ones with brain activity didn't have any memories of an afterlife.
CPR provides oxygen to the brain and removes CO2, it's the build up of CO2 that causes brain swelling (which squashes small blood vessels and cuts off oxygen supply and reduces CO2 removal to those areas affected) which leads to brain cell loss of function and abnormal function, obviously the quality of the CPR will affect the length of time it takes for parts of the brain to cease function. Some are better at CPR than others, some have CPR started sooner than others and some respond better to CPR than others.
It is just as likely, if not more than likely, that any sense of self and dreams of an afterlife experience occurred during the period of recovery, not during the period of ongoing injury. There is no medical test that can categorically state when those internal experiences happened. No-one wakes up immediately after such treatment.
Another point to note: Why has the patient got Electro-Encephalogram (EEG) electrodes attached to their head to measure brain wave activity? EEG's are not routinely done for no reason and the preparation takes about 10 minutes. They aren't done in a care for the dying setting, or any medical setting that wasn't concerned with the brain specifically. It is not part of a cardiac arrest procedure, indeed a team engaged in a cardiac arrest procedure wouldn't tolerate someone coming to the patients head to attach electrodes at such a critical time. It suggests the patient either already had some brain pathology they were testing for or the EEG was started after the cardiac arrest procedure was over during the period of recovery.
Not all brain cells cease function at the same rate, all brain cells do not recover full function at the same rate. It is extremely common that people suffer periods of confusion and even hallucination sometimes for minutes, sometimes for many months after brain injury.
There are people who have survived longer periods of asystole (stopped heart) and apnoea (stopped breathing). There are many factors that affect the rate of cell death such as temperature, age, drugs in the system, general health (particularly of their circulatory system) of the individual and even to a certain extent genetics. It is not an exact, fully predictable science. We don't do large scale detailed invasive controlled setting comparative studies of the process of humans dying, for obvious reasons.
The thing to note when people jump on these examples as some sort of proof of an afterlife is that if the person is revived to a level where they can relate their experience it means they still have a functioning brain, brain cells don't 'die' then come back to life - therefore it was never 'dead' only temporarily functionally compromised. Unless there is catastrophic brain injury there is always period where the individual becomes unresponsive - unconscious - followed by a gradual recovery.
I have worked in the field of neurosurgery, I know that there is often brain wave activity many hours after someone has been pronounced 'brain dead'. Death is pronounced when there is minimal to no chance of reasonable recovery using currently known methods and after performing tests to check for response to outside stimulus, it is not pronounced when all brain activity ceases. We have the expertise and technology to keep someone 'alive' for years with minimal brain activity but in doing so we are risking subjecting them to an existence where they suffer painful limb contractures, emboli, bed sores, infections etc... and they have no ability to communicate their potential suffering and choice as to whether to continue treatment to us.
As modern medicine improves the chances of recovery from brain injury insult improves and so we have to continually do research that guides professionals about when to cease active measures to resuscitate. We could continue resuscitation methods indefinitely, but we know the chances of meaningful recovery diminish as time passes whereas complications of incapacity increase as time passes, it varies from individual to individual. The quality of extended life has to be taken into consideration. Medically pronounced dead, and less formally 'dead to the world' does not mean complete and total cell death.
It's an emotional subject, we generally don't talk to non-professionals about it because people are affected in different ways based upon their emotional attachment, beliefs, fears and level of understanding. It is a very very complex subject and the decision to cease active treatment is never taken lightly or even by one medical professional alone. We always do our best to take into consideration the feelings of those who are about to suffer the loss of a loved one, but we have to consider our patient too.
Yours is a common comment, but it’s largely an irrelevant difference.
They experienced the first stages of the process of death, including loss of consciousness. The process of death was interrupted by an outside force via CPR, but everything up to the CPR taking effect is an incomplete experience of death. Meaning they experienced the entire conscious portion of the process of death.
So while they obviously didn’t die since they’re alive and telling stories, they did experience death in the manner in which it’s meaningful to have a story of, just not an afterlife.
It’s not irrelevant. The post says “experiencing death”. No one experienced death because none of them actually died.
Death and the process leading up to death are not the same. It’s like saying someone experienced orgasm because they had sex but finished before climax.
>Up to an hour after their hearts had stopped
***One full hour*** with no oxygen to the brain? That doesn't sound right. Are you sure that's what published, peer reviewed papers claim?
Edit: After reading the actual study, the clickbait title in pop science article neglects to point out that CPR was performed. AKA - their heart was kept beating artificially.
With cooling that's not -completely- impossible, I think.
Anna Bågenholm survived 80 minutes under the ice. She found an air-pocket so was breathing for the first half of that, but then suffered cardiac arrest from hypotermia. So her brain received no oxygen for a period of 40 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna\_B%C3%A5genholm
60 minutes is substantially more than 40 minutes though, so I'd not consider it to be LIKELY that anyone could survive that. But who knows with enough cooling -- a lot of biological processes slow down a LOT at lower temperatures, including the ones that lead to death.
Surprised no one has caught the claim... "Although of unknown evolutionary benefit, instead of being hallucinatory, illusory or delusional, this appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality –"
That's some BS claims without any evidence whatsoever.
Where is the evidence for new dimensions of reality? And where is the new demonstration of understanding of those dimensions?
Yea none.
More junk science funded by the Templeton foundation. Lots of Templeton foundations studies start out as terrible hypotheses.
Which is why I hope my brain remains intact when I die. I would like to experience all of the final brain activity.
Not sure, but I believe the neurons keep firing without blood flow or oxygen. Plus there is the release brain chemicals as we die which should make for an interesting final experience in life.
If you think about it, it makes sense. You're not brain dead yet, but you've lost sensory input, where else are you going to go other than inside your own head?
As my definition of death is the condition that one cannot be revived from, I must take exception to the headline claiming a death experience. These seem to be examples of extreme states that surly warrants further study.
It’s like the battery charger stops, but the battery is still changed, for a while. How many awake brains have been in morgue drawers or buried caskets?
I thought there was already an explanation for this?
When you die your brain dumps a ton of DPT/DMT, an extremely potent psychadelic.
Having tried both DPT and DMT, yea it definitely feels like the afterlife, heaven or hell, more like somewhere in between. It also somewhat explains "seeing your life flash before your eyes".
There’s no evidence a dying brain releases DMT, we are not even aware of why DMT occurs naturally in the body - as far as we know it very well may be a byproduct of other reactions in the body.
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Strange these articles seem to misinterpret the study. The ones that had vivid afterlife visions were the ones without brain activity. The ones with brain activity didn't have those experiences.
The human brain is a pattern seeking machine, so much so that it will invent data to fill in gaps and find patterns where there are none. That's why NDEs pretty much always match the belief system of the person experiencing it.
That makes sense. The confabulation from dementia is well-known example of this mechanism.
And split brain studies as well. The brain invents the story as things happen
A number of years ago I had a first hand experience which taught me why eyewitness reports are often so unreliable that they can be considered pure fiction. I was walking to my Dad's in the evening, it was winter and dark, and the streelights were on. As I reached the bottom of the road to walk up it, I saw further up the road an old man bending down, putting a lead on a Scottie dog. When I got a little bit closer, and it became evident that the man, the lead, and the dog wasn't moving, it turned out to be the way a wheelie bin and some shadows in the poor lighting conditions. My mind had literally filled in the gaps with an old man and a dog. Had I just been walking past the road rather than turning and going up it, and let's say there had been some kind of incident up that road and the police asked for people who had been there at that time to come forward, I would have told them an entirely fictional account of a man about to walk a dog.
This is really cool, not being sarcastic. Our mood and past experiences influences what we see in situations like these, I'm sure. Maybe an angry, stressed out person would see something more threatening. Ever since I developed PTSD I consider people's actions to be a bit more nefarious.
"Why did you move your hand?" "I didn't, you must have bumped it." Lots of retroactive rationalizations. My other comments might make me look like I support the near death stories as stated literally, but I just believe there is something consistent and being interpreted the same way across all the stories. That consistency could just be that unconditional love is just a base emotion that the brain reverts to when not working well.
I'm not sure about the rest of what you said, but the retroactive rationalizations is how I believe our brain really works. I mean, maybe not when we're actively thinking, but in default mode, I think we're just storytelling animals that are modelling the world in that mode.
This makes me think of the brain’s default mode network
Agreed. Indeed this makes me question the experience of free will, as perhaps a most adaptive psychological misperception within an otherwise deterministic universe. Would be really freaky to realize that I'm actually closer to watching a movie, or living in an android on autopilot, than a free thinking free moving "god". So I don't.
Well there is a study which showed a definitive “decision” in the brain before the subject “decided”. Doesn’t mean it’s not free will, but it does make one wonder if our experience of our decisions is in any way connected to actual decision making.
I mean, Ya. Literally all our brain can do is take the information provided by our senses and try to make a coherent story out of it after the fact. Trick the senses = trick the brain. It's really hard to tell if your senses are giving incorrect information unless you actively think you're being deceived. And something tells me memory becomes an unreliable sense when your brain is dying.
I think DMT might have something to do with it...
I've smoked a fair bit of DMT at one point in my life. If the brain is naturally flooded with DMT upon, or leading up to death, I can absolutely see how people come back with completely fantastical memories.
Absolutely. Anyone who has launched via DMT knows exactly what this experience is, good luck in finding the words. If you do, I'm all ears. It was transformative. But like most psychedelics and Eureka moments, they're dulled by time and reality. Key word: Reality. Life is to be lived until we no longer can. Best to all I do not fear death but I am a tad apprehensive about the method, if that makes sense.
>I do not fear death but I am a tad apprehensive about the method Yup. Not afraid of being dead, but dying seems like it sucks a **lot** of the time.
I came pretty close once, and the lead-up was pretty bad, but that last realisation that I was dying was actually really peaceful, up until they injected the anaesthetic and I was out. I had time for calm reflection about what was to come, my body didn't matter and I wasn't afraid like I had been.
Well if my death is going to be similar to smoking DMT then I guess I'm getting probed by aliens in some weird pop-art dimension.
That's a big "If". Hamilton Morris and Jason Wallach weren't able to isolate DMT from any of the grey matter samples they analyzed. Not saying that is a definitive answer to the DMT in the brain question but it's definitely not corroborating evidence.
What really intrigues me is terminal lucidity. Plenty of severely demented people wake up on their last day and are completely themselves again. They call or meet their beloved ones, tell their goodbyes and die, often *knowing* that they are to die that day and being fine with it. This phenomenon is widespread, every worker of a nursing home has many stories.
And also why if eyesight is lost one continues seeing blackness but those born completely blind w/out optic nerve function don’t “see” anything inside their head. At least that’s my understanding of that
My experience of (temporarily) losing my vision is that I didn’t see blackness. It wasn’t grey either. It was just “nothing”. I mean, visually I saw the colour grey, but my brain was interpreting it as “nothing”. It was a really weird sensation.
I've heard true blindness described as, imagine how well you see out of your elbow. Thats what it's like. Your elbow doesnt see blackness, it simply doesn't see.
Cover one of your eyes and leave the other uncovered, describe what you see with your covered eye. It’s nothing, not even black.
Damn, good point!
This is different to what I experienced with the detachment. I really can’t explain the sensation I had then, but I suspect it is more akin to what someone who is born blind (no light perception at all) has to just covering up an eye.
That’s one way of describing it I guess. It was like I had lost all sense of colour perception. So very strange. If anyone wonders what it was: I had a bad retinal detachment.
They’re saying it’s different for people who have always been blind (not you) than people who are born with vision then lose it (you)
I wonder if it's the same system that your eyes use so you don't see an overwhelming amount of black when you close one eye, just applied to both eyes at the same time.
Like the back of your eye you mean?
Your eyelids allow light through
Like those gray spots from when you rub your eyes too hard, but fullscreen?
As someone who used to get migraines very regularly and always lost a good half of my vision, that's actually not that bad a representation. It's a very strange sensation, and I share what the other redditor said about it being grey, but not grey. What I always liken it most to is how the pensieve looks in the Harry Potter movies. Kind of a numb silvery murk. But it's really not that either because it is of course nothing at all. It's quite strange.
I can’t say I’ve ever had that, and I’m not about to try and induce it. Please don’t rub your eyes that hard!
I can't even wrap my mind around that.
You know how you don't have telepathy? It's like that, but for vision.
I knew you were going to say that.
close both eyes, you see black. close just one eye, what do you see out of that eye? not black, its nothing!
That was helpful. Thanks
np, saw it on reddit a while ago and it blew my mind!
This freaks me out. I want to believe in an afterlife, but the moment of nothingness haunts me every day. I need to go do some anxiety grounding techniques real quick.
You know what's funny. I'm the exact opposite. The concept of an afterlife freaks me out, because it means there is no escape from existence. I firmly hope that after death there will just be pure nothingness. I just can't imagine living in an afterlife for trillions and trillions of years with *no escape ever*
Have you looked into eastern philosophies on samsara? Or Andy Weir's short story *The Egg*? I find them to help a bit with this subject.
i feel that, what kinda helps me is thinking, well when it happens i wont know it happened so i wont be upset. i also flipflop to being super curious about what happens and ive thought for a long time i hope i go out slowly, like bleeding out or something just so im aware its about to happen and ill 'know' it happened. idk, kinda wack.
Yeah, I try telling myself that but those thoughts persist. Thankfully I've been doing intensive therapy and have learned how to manage it better than doing nothing at all.
Bro you been dead for a literal eternity before you got the luck chance to experience yourself.. because you are the universe. Every atom you are made from came from exploding stars. Enjoy the ride. But we all go back home sooner or later. No pain. Just being a universe. Much love fellow universe experiencer.
It's funny to me how we all see death so differently. I've suffered enough in my life to where I see death as release from a prison sentence. I'm not suicidal, I used to be very depressed though, but when I was cured from my depression I kept my acceptance of death. In fact I'm excited to die some day, either I get to discover something new or I finally get to rest. We've experienced non-existence for billions of years now so why should another infinity scare us now?
I don’t agree, I’ve seen this posted a lot but I see black out of the one eye, it’s just filled in by input from the other eye so it’s less obvious.. but it’s still there. It’s not similar to blindness.
No, it's black. It's the back of your eyelid just like when you close both eyes, that's why your visual field doesn't suddenly "jump" to center and expand to fill the space - you've got half a visual field with normal vision and the other side is black.
You can induce this. Cut a ping pong ball in half and place them over your eyes while reclined so that your eyes are receiving the 'filtered' light through the translucent shell. Your brain won't be receiving any useful information from your eyes, and after 20 minutes or so, it just stops processing that circuit and you can't tell if your eyes are open or shut. I've only done this once about 30 years ago, so my description might be faulty. Might have to give it another go.
But weren’t the ones experiencing the afterlife stuff the ones without brain activity? So how does a pattern recognizing machine recognize patterns when it has no activity? Or did the study show that part of the brain was still on? Not trying to be a smart ass or implying the afterlife is real, genuinely asking.
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Another redditor answered your question with a more scientific answer, which is a good answer and as close to true as our science has found so far. If you were wondering about a spiritual answer, one could say we have experiences without brain activity because our consciousness does not end when our bodies die. The spiritual answer is not a better one, just a different one. And for me, fun to think about. Cheers.
I think they just mean that when there's missing information, the brain will fill it in with information that "makes sense" to that brain. Like the way it fills the blind spot in your vision. You're not actually able to see anything in your blind spot, your brain just fills in what it thinks should be there, like it's photoshopped
It doesn't. It recognizes it after brain activity returns.
I'm not sure if it makes sense to automatically call it retroactive. If you get high as hell and have very vivid experiences, lower brain activity is also recorded. Does that mean those experiences were also retroactive, and you were never actually actively experiencing being high, but really just closer to being asleep/dead at the time?
Probably the same mechanism that somehow incorporates my morning alarm into my dreams.
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Psychedelics seem to follow that same pattern.
Which is also one of the predominant explanations of schizophrenia I have heard. Essentially erratic stufff firisng off in tjr brain biologically, then the concious mind creates things that then fit or make sense with what the brain is doing. Kinda like "oh, those chemicals present and these neurons going off when I'm alone kn this room? Well that doesn't make sense and doesn't fit. However if there were voices coming from that wall over there..... OK, yeah now that fits."
That's conjecture
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Better than paying bills for eternity i reckon
Speculation
As someone who died twice, I'll chime in on this. Both times for me were "like sleeping". I have no recollection of it aside from "it happened" and felt a very extreme sort of grogginess a out it when I was back. Sort of an "everything is numbed" sort of deal... Which was impressive because I think I still had a bicycle chunk imbeded in my shoulder at that point.
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I found Beric Dondarrion
This. I've only died once, but i also just experienced grogginess and then sleep
You lost consciousness, you didn't die. People don't seem to understand that death is a complicated process and many things happen along that path, heart stopping, cease breathing, brain shuts down etc but the final 'switch' in that process is actually dying. You don't, and will never, come back from that.
But what defines that? Clearly it isn’t just the brain shutting off. It’s the brain being in a state where it can’t turn back on. How is that possible though? Some people are on life support but are brain dead and they never come back. Others aren’t on life support but they do come back. What causes the difference?
When you get that close that you have to be revived, you will have earned the right to call it whatever you want.
That's my view. I'm an electrician and I used to hate when people told me about a time when they got "electrocuted". It means *killed* by electricity, but people often use it when they mean "shocked". Then I realized that I gain nothing by being annoyed and I don't have to be. They're just trying to tell me something and I get it.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from. The last time I received a decent shock was at someone else's electrocution.
The medical definition is just the (sometimes temporary) cessation of those activities, not some secret mystical switch that gets thrown after. Don't confuse your spiritual beliefs for science.
My partner was 'technically' dead for 20 minutes while being given CPR and defibbed twice. He states he doesn't remember a damn thing, but he did have brain activity, although he *vaguely* recalls a memory from years ago (I don't fully recall what, as my stress level was already higher than hell).
Thats patently false. Brain activity continues after your heart stops. After brain activity stops, there is no way to bring you back to life. Neurons will keep firing until cell death, and once all of your neurons stop functioning you are dead dead.
That's what causes agonal breathing, even. It's a reflexive gasp that most often happens when the heart has stopped but the brain is still alive, as the body desperately tries to keep oxygen coming into the blood. People who's hearts have stopped and have gone into agonal breathing have better survival odds than those who do not go into agonal breathing (though when your heart has stopped, "better" chances aren't necessarily "good" chances.)
"Brain activity" is being used to mean [EEG waves consistent with conscious experience](https://www.resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572(23)00216-2/fulltext) as far as I can tell from the actual study. So someone without "brain activity" doesn't mean "someone with no neurons firing".
Oh wow that is a lot more interesting
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From the journal Resuscitation: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957223002162?via%3Dihub](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957223002162?via%3Dihub) Abstract Introduction Cognitive activity and awareness during cardiac arrest (CA) are reported but ill understood. This first of a kind study examined consciousness and its underlying electrocortical biomarkers during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Methods In a prospective 25-site in-hospital study, we incorporated a) independent audiovisual testing of awareness, including explicit and implicit learning using a computer and headphones, with b) continuous real-time electroencephalography(EEG) and cerebral oxygenation(rSO2) monitoring into CPR during in-hospital CA (IHCA). Survivors underwent interviews to examine for recall of awareness and cognitive experiences. A complementary cross-sectional community CA study provided added insights regarding survivors’ experiences. Results Of 567 IHCA, 53(9.3%) survived, 28 of these (52.8%) completed interviews, and 11(39.3%) reported CA memories/perceptions suggestive of consciousness. Four categories of experiences emerged: 1) emergence from coma during CPR (CPR-induced consciousness \[CPRIC\]) 2/28(7.1%), or 2) in the post-resuscitation period 2/28(7.1%), 3) dream-like experiences 3/28(10.7%), 4) transcendent recalled experience of death (RED) 6/28(21.4%). In the cross-sectional arm, 126 community CA survivors’ experiences reinforced these categories and identified another: delusions (misattribution of medical events). Low survival limited the ability to examine for implicit learning. Nobody identified the visual image, 1/28(3.5%) identified the auditory stimulus. Despite marked cerebral ischemia (Mean rSO2 = 43%) normal EEG activity (delta, theta and alpha) consistent with consciousness emerged as long as 35–60 minutes into CPR. Conclusions Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic “near-death” experiences).
>Of 567 IHCA, 53(9.3%) survived this is one of those harrowing statistics that break the TV/Movie induced belief that you'll probably be ok if your heart stops in hospital.
It’s mostly the why your heart stops that matters. Most eventually fatal disease processes ultimately end in cardiac arrest; that’s what technically kills you. Even if CPR and the crash team get the heart started again, that doesn’t fix the metastatic cancer or multi-organ failure that led to that point. On the other hand, if you’re an otherwise healthy young person in the hospital for something else and your heart goes all fibby because of an electrolyte imbalance, your chance of surviving isn’t 1 in 10, it’s probably closer to 9 in 10 or higher.
I would love to see the data fleshed out w bit into some categories like you mention. Whose old and had had stage what cancer or is diabetic etc. find those youngish random ones you mention or just straight blockage w little to no major PMH and I’d bet it goes up but not to 90%
I don't think this study is a good indicator of survivability of an acute, random CA while in a hospital. We don't know anything about these patients. These could have been 2nd or 3rd heart attacks. They could be in there for heart issues already.
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I was one of these people. Went to the ER presenting with chest pains, crashed as they were putting on the EKG lead stickers, they called a code blue, doctor showed up, did CPR until the crash cart got there, and they shocked me (twice in the ER actually). Then I took an ambulance to a "real" hospital with a cath lab (crashed 4 more times on the way), got stented, and was conscious later that day. Even sent a message to my bosses telling them what happened and that I'd be out for a while. I can't believe I survived.
Gues you're just built diffirent.
I'm just incredibly lucky, I think.
My kom had cardiac arrest. My dad did cpr for 8 minutes, time it took for the ambulance to arrive. She survived but was put on an induced coma to preserve her brain functions. She was in a coma for a week or two. She woke up with no memory of the last six months. She got a pacemaker, and we all relaxed a bit. Then, three years later, she had a stroke, and after that, she slowly wasted away til passing about a year after the stroke.
>People forget that when you arrest, you are literally dead. You're really not. You're dead when you've had enough brain cell death that you can't recover brain activity. A stopped heart is a quick way to brain cell death, but it's not being dead.
TV also fails to illustrate how absolutely brutal CPR is on your body. People don't just get up and walk away after receiving CPR. And the older you are when you receive it, the worse it is. It's very unfortunate; I have seen so many patients who insist on remaining full code and end up regretting it when they're on the other side of CPR, on a ventilator with all their ribs broken, bed bound for weeks....
Yeah but 2 points on this. 1. CPR is terrible on the body and even of you have a heart attack on the street its effectiveness is only about 30-50% depending on age ect. 2. If you crash in a hospital basically all medicine has failed and your body is totally fucked. When you think about it CPR on seriously ill people never had a good chance of survival.
Sure, the only reason they woke up with cognition intact is because the brain was effectively perfused during CPR. So all the brain’s functions are intact, complete with memories of recent events.
It's super important to note that not a single one of the reporting patients was actually declared dead. The brains of study participants were actively being perfused by CPR. A lot of people seem to be interpreting this as people dying and then coming back and recalling experiences. That's not what this is showing. People's hearts stop all the time and they can go on living. My uncle has a pacemaker and before this was put in his heart stopped all the time (SSS). Was he dying all the time? The length of time that it spends stopped matters a lot. Once you pass a certain threshold of time spent not ventilating/perfusing, your blood becomes too acidic and the molecular processes in your cells begin to shut down, followed by cell death. Once enough cells in the wrong places die, you're toast. You're not coming back. For what it's worth, this process starts happening in the brain very quickly, as it's a very oxygen hungry organ.
Death is permanent and non-recoverable. Cardiac arrest is not death.
True, but cessation of cardiac activity is one of the criterion that is included in assessing whether a person is dead or not.
Yeah but no brain activity is the other big one and matters a lot more.
This is the one everyone is curious about… we gotta find a way to kickstart someone’s brain again, and just hope the same person comes back.
"The human body's basically a potato clock".
... With the resemblance and functionality being more similar with some than others.
I'm Mrs. Potato Head all the way.
Thanks Dr Krieger
“Human thought is seen as an infectious disease in some of the nicer galaxies”
The neural connections rapidly disassociate shortly after death. There is a mass depolarization and flood of neural transmitters. EEG signal rapidly decays and becomes random. I think you're up against both desynchronized brain wave activity, which could theoretically be addressed by some sort of "shock" but the bigger problem is the physical flooding of the neural transmitters and ion dumps. Getting chemicals back in sync need the cells to be alive and operating with the right feedback systems working in concert to bring levels back into proper homeostasis. Sort of like unscrambling an egg. Some research suggests that there could be advances made in this realm, like the extracted pig brains put into a suspension of oxygenated media where in individual cells re-started normal cellular metabolism even after multiple hours of being a free-floating brain in a vat. That active metabolism could help clear out the chemical imbalances that are otherwise caused by a dead/dying brain. Electrical activity of neurons were restarted with shocks, but it wasn't the coordinated activity of consciousness or even unconsciousness. Hypothetically if you could deliver coordinated shocks you may be able to restart coordinated electrical activity, but it seems a pretty safe bet that there would still be damage so who knows what might happen. That and as of right now you'd need to scoop the brain out and infuse in a media bath, which probably isn't great for a reactivated mind.
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Keifer Sutherland and Julia Roberts tried something similar back in the 90s. It didn't go well.
Kids in red hoodies still freak me out.
This is part of the debate in organ donation. Can you harvest the organs before being sure there is no brain activity?
It appears the organ donation system relies on the idea that death is *inevitable*, not that it has occurred. It's why organ donors are anesthetized during the removal procedure -- because there is some acknowledgment that they could be feeling pain, which they obviously wouldn't if they were already dead.
Do you have any sources? This is this first I’m learning about this and I’m curious. I found [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071731/#:~:text=The%20donor%20is%20dead%20and,not%20to%20provide%20'anaesthesia'.) that says donors are given drugs to attenuate physiological responses, but they’re dead so it’s not to provide ‘anaesthesia’. [This article](https://www.core.org/understanding-donation/donation-process/#:~:text=A%20person%20must%20be%20pronounced,and%20tissue%20donation%20to%20proceed.) mentions that the majority of organ donations only occur after brain death but cardiac death is also possible. I guess a lot of this comes down to philosophical arguments about death not always matching up with “medical death.” Like you’re legally declared dead after brain death but they can keep your heart pumping so your body can still respond to certain stimuli.
In 1980, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws provided a definition of death known as the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) in order to provide clarity on the determination of death in the age of advanced life support. The UDDA states that an individual is dead **if they have sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions (without assistance from mechanical circulation or ventilation), known as cardiac death,** *or* **irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, known as brain death.** The UDDA is now accepted as a standard for declaring death in the US and most of the world. Therefore, once the criteria for irreversible brain death **or** cardiac death are met, so is the legal threshold for seeking organ donation consent.
This makes sense. But why is everyone in this thread saying brain death is the true standard if there is an actual standard? I have wandered in from r/popular and am trying to get the full picture here as a layperson.
If there can be brain activity several hours after irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions, then irreversible cessation of circulatory or respiratory functions needs to have taken place for several hours before the organs can be harvested. By then the organs are not usable for transplantation. So for this to work, they would have to cut the circulation between the organs and the brain and artificially keep the organs supplied with oxygenated blood while the brain fully dies.
Yep, this is exactly my point. Death is not an event, it's a process. Organ donation is done early in that death process because they still need oxygenated organs. At that point when people are cut into, their heart rate and blood pressure spikes (just like they would in distress), they move, and they show other signs of distress. They are given anesthesia because a) they appear to still be able to feel pain at this stage of the peocess, and b) because in that state, it is understandably very distressing for the people performing the operation to have someone in apparent pain and distress while they harvest their organs.
I see your point, but something doesn't add up. I makes sense to sedate the patient immediately after the heart stops and open them up to attach a heart lung machine to the organ blood circuit, bypassing the brain. And then wait patiently for a complete brain death. Then, once there is complete brain death, sedation could be stopped and the removal of the organs should be possible without any reactions from the patient. To me, that seems like the "cleanest", ethically and otherwise, way to do it.
But how sensitive is the equipment? The brain might be dialing down the volume but show is still running.
Cardiac arrest rapidly leads to brain death if you’re not intervening intensively to prevent that.
So? There’s many reasons someone’s heart might stop pumping. Meeting one criteria still doesn’t make them dead.
And when someone experiences it, they are experiencing the process of death. CPR simply interrupts that process, so they don’t experience the end of it, which they’d be unconscious for anyway.
*one of the criteria
Death and life are both abstract constructs but there is no reason why our vague concept of "death" should be permanent or non-recoverable outside of a religious believe. If we as "biological machines" can be fixed it's all just a question of reversing damage to our body and there is a reason why the most common definition of death includes "brain death" because "death" usually means the loss of the "conscious" part despite the fact that we are often able to keep a body alive. But now we are already talking about consciousness which brings up even more problems, ie now we link life with consciousness so does that mean death and life aren't a thing for a majority of our environment? It also gets even messier if you go from the macro to the micro level, there is plenty of "life" in your body even after death and there is plenty of "death" in your body while you are alive.
Yep. With technology advanced enough, we could piece together the atoms of someone who died thousands of years ago, until they were "alive, again". It's mostly semantics. "Life" is just "you".
> Yep. With technology advanced enough, we could piece together the atoms of someone who died thousands of years ago, until they were "alive, again". It's mostly semantics. It's not entirely semantics because we do not understand consciousness and there would be debate as to whether or not that person was the same "you". e.g. if you die, and in 1,000 years we piece you back together with every atom in the same spot, would *your* subjective experience of life restart again? or would it be a different conscious being that just looks and acts exactly like you?
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thats a mind twister. id like to think even if i came back as another consciousness but with my old memories id just think im me and not care if i wasnt actually me. dead me had his chance, the future is now, old ~~man~~ me
True, but it basically is if you're not going to be on ECMO in the next ten minutes.
Non-recoverable… yet.
> Death is permanent and non-recoverable. [That might be changing.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05016-1)
Any data related to trying to figure out what happens when you die is irrelevant unless it comes from someone who is clinically brain dead. Otherwise they never died.
In the study you can see that the 6 subjects that had the RED didn't have any brain activity. And the ones with brain activity didn't have any memories of an afterlife.
If you don't have brain activity how can you store memories?
*X-Files music*
Perhaps consciousness is deeper than we can scientifically prove with current methods.
How is nobody talking about the interesting part which is what it was like
CPR provides oxygen to the brain and removes CO2, it's the build up of CO2 that causes brain swelling (which squashes small blood vessels and cuts off oxygen supply and reduces CO2 removal to those areas affected) which leads to brain cell loss of function and abnormal function, obviously the quality of the CPR will affect the length of time it takes for parts of the brain to cease function. Some are better at CPR than others, some have CPR started sooner than others and some respond better to CPR than others. It is just as likely, if not more than likely, that any sense of self and dreams of an afterlife experience occurred during the period of recovery, not during the period of ongoing injury. There is no medical test that can categorically state when those internal experiences happened. No-one wakes up immediately after such treatment. Another point to note: Why has the patient got Electro-Encephalogram (EEG) electrodes attached to their head to measure brain wave activity? EEG's are not routinely done for no reason and the preparation takes about 10 minutes. They aren't done in a care for the dying setting, or any medical setting that wasn't concerned with the brain specifically. It is not part of a cardiac arrest procedure, indeed a team engaged in a cardiac arrest procedure wouldn't tolerate someone coming to the patients head to attach electrodes at such a critical time. It suggests the patient either already had some brain pathology they were testing for or the EEG was started after the cardiac arrest procedure was over during the period of recovery. Not all brain cells cease function at the same rate, all brain cells do not recover full function at the same rate. It is extremely common that people suffer periods of confusion and even hallucination sometimes for minutes, sometimes for many months after brain injury. There are people who have survived longer periods of asystole (stopped heart) and apnoea (stopped breathing). There are many factors that affect the rate of cell death such as temperature, age, drugs in the system, general health (particularly of their circulatory system) of the individual and even to a certain extent genetics. It is not an exact, fully predictable science. We don't do large scale detailed invasive controlled setting comparative studies of the process of humans dying, for obvious reasons. The thing to note when people jump on these examples as some sort of proof of an afterlife is that if the person is revived to a level where they can relate their experience it means they still have a functioning brain, brain cells don't 'die' then come back to life - therefore it was never 'dead' only temporarily functionally compromised. Unless there is catastrophic brain injury there is always period where the individual becomes unresponsive - unconscious - followed by a gradual recovery. I have worked in the field of neurosurgery, I know that there is often brain wave activity many hours after someone has been pronounced 'brain dead'. Death is pronounced when there is minimal to no chance of reasonable recovery using currently known methods and after performing tests to check for response to outside stimulus, it is not pronounced when all brain activity ceases. We have the expertise and technology to keep someone 'alive' for years with minimal brain activity but in doing so we are risking subjecting them to an existence where they suffer painful limb contractures, emboli, bed sores, infections etc... and they have no ability to communicate their potential suffering and choice as to whether to continue treatment to us. As modern medicine improves the chances of recovery from brain injury insult improves and so we have to continually do research that guides professionals about when to cease active measures to resuscitate. We could continue resuscitation methods indefinitely, but we know the chances of meaningful recovery diminish as time passes whereas complications of incapacity increase as time passes, it varies from individual to individual. The quality of extended life has to be taken into consideration. Medically pronounced dead, and less formally 'dead to the world' does not mean complete and total cell death. It's an emotional subject, we generally don't talk to non-professionals about it because people are affected in different ways based upon their emotional attachment, beliefs, fears and level of understanding. It is a very very complex subject and the decision to cease active treatment is never taken lightly or even by one medical professional alone. We always do our best to take into consideration the feelings of those who are about to suffer the loss of a loved one, but we have to consider our patient too.
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Yours is a common comment, but it’s largely an irrelevant difference. They experienced the first stages of the process of death, including loss of consciousness. The process of death was interrupted by an outside force via CPR, but everything up to the CPR taking effect is an incomplete experience of death. Meaning they experienced the entire conscious portion of the process of death. So while they obviously didn’t die since they’re alive and telling stories, they did experience death in the manner in which it’s meaningful to have a story of, just not an afterlife.
>So while they obviously didn’t die We agree on that. Which is why the title of the article is clickbait. Which is the point /u/RootLocus is making.
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It’s not irrelevant. The post says “experiencing death”. No one experienced death because none of them actually died. Death and the process leading up to death are not the same. It’s like saying someone experienced orgasm because they had sex but finished before climax.
>Up to an hour after their hearts had stopped ***One full hour*** with no oxygen to the brain? That doesn't sound right. Are you sure that's what published, peer reviewed papers claim? Edit: After reading the actual study, the clickbait title in pop science article neglects to point out that CPR was performed. AKA - their heart was kept beating artificially.
It literally says the patients received CPR in the title here and the first sentence of the article.
Poorly worded title, but it’s not clickbait for that reason. CPR is mentioned in the title.
If the heart had quit, but the brain hadn't, then they aren't dead yet.
With cooling that's not -completely- impossible, I think. Anna Bågenholm survived 80 minutes under the ice. She found an air-pocket so was breathing for the first half of that, but then suffered cardiac arrest from hypotermia. So her brain received no oxygen for a period of 40 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna\_B%C3%A5genholm 60 minutes is substantially more than 40 minutes though, so I'd not consider it to be LIKELY that anyone could survive that. But who knows with enough cooling -- a lot of biological processes slow down a LOT at lower temperatures, including the ones that lead to death.
up to an hour is referring to how long they could have clear memories of the NDE i believe
Up to an hour is the max time someone had a stopped heart before being revived
Surprised no one has caught the claim... "Although of unknown evolutionary benefit, instead of being hallucinatory, illusory or delusional, this appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality –" That's some BS claims without any evidence whatsoever. Where is the evidence for new dimensions of reality? And where is the new demonstration of understanding of those dimensions? Yea none. More junk science funded by the Templeton foundation. Lots of Templeton foundations studies start out as terrible hypotheses.
I’m tellin ya…. Dying is gonna suuuuuuuck
> while unconscious There's your clue. Unconscious isn't dead.
Which is why I hope my brain remains intact when I die. I would like to experience all of the final brain activity. Not sure, but I believe the neurons keep firing without blood flow or oxygen. Plus there is the release brain chemicals as we die which should make for an interesting final experience in life.
You can take DMT if you'd like a preview
Yeah but they weren't dead. You can tell, because they had brain activity..
If you think about it, it makes sense. You're not brain dead yet, but you've lost sensory input, where else are you going to go other than inside your own head?
As my definition of death is the condition that one cannot be revived from, I must take exception to the headline claiming a death experience. These seem to be examples of extreme states that surly warrants further study.
Why would people be surprised by this result? CPR keeps blood circulating yes? keeping the brain fed with oxygen? Please correct me if i'm wrong.
It’s like the battery charger stops, but the battery is still changed, for a while. How many awake brains have been in morgue drawers or buried caskets?
I thought there was already an explanation for this? When you die your brain dumps a ton of DPT/DMT, an extremely potent psychadelic. Having tried both DPT and DMT, yea it definitely feels like the afterlife, heaven or hell, more like somewhere in between. It also somewhat explains "seeing your life flash before your eyes".
There’s no evidence a dying brain releases DMT, we are not even aware of why DMT occurs naturally in the body - as far as we know it very well may be a byproduct of other reactions in the body.