Possible Evidence for Consciousness During Clinical Death

[Calliope]

There is scientific evidence to suggest that life can continue after death, according to the largest ever medical study carried out on the subject.

A team based in the UK has spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences, and found that almost 40 per cent of survivors described having some form of “awareness” at a time when they were declared clinically dead.

Experts currently believe that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating – and that it is not possible to be aware of anything at all once that has happened.

But scientists in the new study said they heard compelling evidence that patients experienced real events for up to three minutes after this had happened – and could recall them accurately once they had been resuscitated.

Source

Second, third

I generally don't like to believe in things such as near death experiences so I am a bit skeptical about this but hey, scientific evidence is scientific evidence. However, I have yet to see it on a news site that I deem credible (I have no experience with the Mirror, Telegraph, or Independent). If this is genuine, for me, it brings up issues with people who sign up to be organ donors. I wonder if they would feel the pain.

 

[INTP]

Its not a new finding that brains(studied more in rats, but there has been some small study with humans too) get active some time after death.

Watch this video first if you dont already know how actionpotential works:

So when it comes to dying, these sodium/potassium pumps that keep the sodium and potassium separated and thus keeps the nerves from firing when not needed stops functioning properly(they need energy to do this work and they start to lose energy when an animal dies). This causes the nerves(or axons) to fire signals even tho there isnt any triggers for them and voilá, you get some brain activation after death.

I already concluded few years ago that this must be the reason why people experience such stuff as life after death. I mean if your whole brains get active like this, you wont be able to sense time -> it feels eternal. If your sensory cortex does this, it would most likely be experienced as a bright light at the end of a tunnel(which you seem to go towards to because the light gets larger as the activation spreads). Also i think that this explains the idea of heaven and hell, because what you experience then is what your brains were made of during your life, do bad things and thats what you get, do good and thats what you get. Also naturally moral judgments comes from some part of your brains, and that part will get activated also and is not hindered by your ego, this i think is where the christian(and also prevalent in other beliefs) idea of final judgment comes from. And if you have a strong faith(=programmed yourself to interpret whats going on during death and have no doubts about it) in one form of afterlife(christian, islam or what ever) and you judge yourself as worthy of it(even after looking yourself without ego distracting you), that is what you get.
Buddhists believe(=tibetan book of the death says, not all buddhists follow it tho) that you get stuck on your complexes if you have strong unresolved issues, you need to fight these "demons" and conquer them if you didnt during life or you might get stuck in them forever and your soul cannot be born again. So they have monks and the family praying for the recently passed away person and telling him to let go of those things and that he is dead now and should move on and leave everything behind.

 

[AngularVelocity]

Its not a new finding that brains(studied more in rats, but there has been some small study with humans too) get active some time after death.

Watch this video first if you dont already know how actionpotential works:

So when it comes to dying, these sodium/potassium pumps that keep the sodium and potassium separated and thus keeps the nerves from firing when not needed stops functioning properly(they need energy to do this work and they start to lose energy when an animal dies). This causes the nerves(or axons) to fire signals even tho there isnt any triggers for them and voilá, you get some brain activation after death.

I already concluded few years ago that this must be the reason why people experience such stuff as life after death. I mean if your whole brains get active like this, you wont be able to sense time -> it feels eternal. If your sensory cortex does this, it would most likely be experienced as a bright light at the end of a tunnel(which you seem to go towards to because the light gets larger as the activation spreads). Also i think that this explains the idea of heaven and hell, because what you experience then is what your brains were made of during your life, do bad things and thats what you get, do good and thats what you get. Also naturally moral judgments comes from some part of your brains, and that part will get activated also and is not hindered by your ego, this i think is where the christian(and also prevalent in other beliefs) idea of final judgment comes from. And if you have a strong faith(=programmed yourself to interpret whats going on during death and have no doubts about it) in one form of afterlife(christian, islam or what ever) and you judge yourself as worthy of it(even after looking yourself without ego distracting you), that is what you get.
Buddhists believe(=tibetan book of the death says, not all buddhists follow it tho) that you get stuck on your complexes if you have strong unresolved issues, you need to fight these "demons" and conquer them if you didnt during life or you might get stuck in them forever and your soul cannot be born again. So they have monks and the family praying for the recently passed away person and telling him to let go of those things and that he is dead now and should move on and leave everything behind.

There was also a source in that article where the "dead" patient was able to describe what procedures were being done to their body, and at such a high level of detail, that there was no way they would've known what was happening.

I have no bias here because I don't really care whether or not this is true, but it's an interesting concept to think about. I am most curious about future studies that will be related to this subject. I don't think it is as simple as an action potential for a reasoning for such a phenomenon. That doesn't explain people transcending their experience to outside their body and watching themselves and the hospital staff as an observer.