Cardiac arrest patients recall clinicians performing CPR, perception of separation from body, and observation of events without distress
What happens when you die, the sensations you feel, the experiences you have lived are still a fascinating mystery that has been looking for answers for years. Some research has tried to investigate the phenomenon and now a large study presented earlier this month at the American Heart Association symposium on cardiopulmonary resuscitation has found in patients who have found themselves on the brink of death (and apparently unconscious) the presence of spikes in brain activity, the so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves up to one hour after resuscitation. Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and perform higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception.
I study
The study was conducted by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in the United States involved 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating during hospitalization and who received resuscitation between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and in the UK. Despite immediate treatment only one in 5 patients survived cardiac arrest after cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Only 28 were able to speak and respond to the researchers’ interview.
The absence of anxiety
The British doctor led the work Sam Parniaa critical care expert at New York medical center NYU Langone Health, who has been investigating what happens when the heart stops for 20 years, reported that many patients have shown that they remember the doctors involved in the resuscitation maneuvers. Survivors, hooked up to brain-monitoring devices, have reported having unique lucid experiences, such as the perception of separation from the bodyl’observation of events without pain or distress it’s a meaningful evaluation of life, including their actions, intentions and thoughts towards others. Researchers have found that these death experiences are different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams, or resuscitation-induced consciousness. These remembered experiences and brain wave changes may be early signs of so-called near death experience Sam Parnia said.
The tales
Two of the 28 participants who were ultimately interviewed recalled hearing medical staff work while they were resuscitated. Another patient reported seeing doctors scrubbing his chest. Three patients spoke of dream experiences, others recalled evaluating their own lives and thinking about the impact it had had on others. Six patients said they remembered the death experience (one woman reported hearing her long-deceased grandmother tell her to come back to her body). Some individuals felt they were headed to a destination they perceived as their home, others recalled intensive care activities. The identification of measurable electrical signs of lucid and intense brain activity, together with the recall of similar death experience histories suggests that the human sense of seeing of one’s consciousness, just like other biological functions of the body, may not stop completely at the moment of death adds Parnia who concludes: Our results show that while we are on the verge of death or in a coma people suffer a unique inner conscious experienceincluding awareness without distress.
The previous
This study is the last piece of research on this still largely unexplored line of research. Research published some time ago in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience had recorded the brain waves of a man who died of a heart attack and discovered that the brain, even after the heart has stopped beating, still continues its activity: just thirty seconds, truly the last of life. An increase in very specific brain waves known as gamma oscillations, linked to activities such as memory retrieval, meditation and dreaming, was recorded just before and immediately after cardiac arrest.
November 19, 2022 (change November 19, 2022 | 12:23 am)
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