Near-death experiences and postmortem brain signals

World - Near-death experiences and brain signals after death — Photo: Marco_Piunti/E+/Getty Images.

“I told them, ‘Wait. Give me more anesthetic.’ It took me a moment to realize that I wasn’t in the same dimension as them, so they couldn’t hear me.”

Mr. Osteen then saw himself “going through the chest” and floating above the operating table while the surgical team opened his chest, removed his heart, and began repairing the damage. Not long after, he heard someone say “kidney.”

“Both my kidneys stopped working at the same time. I knew it was the end. That was when I reached a new level of experience. And when I got there, I saw God, the light behind him. It was brighter than any light I had ever seen on earth, but it was not blinding,” he said.

“A sweet angel comforted me and said, 'Don't worry. Everything will be okay,' and I needed to go back.”

“Now that I understand, I am brought back to tell people about my experience.”

Near-death experience

On that winter day, Mr. Osteen had what experts call a near-death experience. This can happen when doctors revive a person who has stopped breathing and whose heart has stopped beating. These are factors that occur when a person dies for any reason, not just a heart attack.

Millions of people have reported near-death experiences since cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) procedures were developed in 1960, says Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care physician at NYU Langone Health who has studied the phenomenon for decades.

Parnia is the lead author of a recent study that aimed to detect “hidden consciousness” in death by measuring electrical signals in the brain when patients stop breathing and their hearts stop beating.

“Many people have reported similar experiences. Their consciousness has become higher and clearer, they can think more clearly and sharply while doctors like me are trying to revive them and think they are dead.”

“They often feel like they are separated from their bodies, they can see the doctors and nurses. They can describe in detail what they feel, what the doctors are doing around them in a way that they cannot explain.”

He also said that they often look back on their lives, recalling thoughts, feelings and events that they would not normally recall, and begin to evaluate themselves based on moral principles. It is “a complete understanding of one’s own behavior throughout life in a way that one cannot deceive oneself.”

Many of these people often report encounters with the divine, and Mr. Parnia says they can be interpreted in different ways: “If they are Christian, they say, ‘I met Jesus,’ and if they are atheist, they say, ‘I met a being of love and compassion.’ All of these things have been reported over the last 60 years.”

Measuring brain waves during CPR

In the study, published Thursday in the scientific journal Resuscitation, teams of trained staff at 25 hospitals in the United States, Britain and Bulgaria followed doctors into rooms where patients were clinically dead.

While doctors performed CPR, the team attached oxygen and brainwave monitors to the patients' heads. Resuscitation efforts typically lasted 23 to 26 minutes. However, some doctors attempted CPR for up to an hour, the study said.

“Resuscitation is a very stressful and difficult process. It is very intense. No one has done similar studies before, but our independent research teams have successfully performed measurements without interrupting the patient’s medical care activities,” said Mr. Parnia.

Brain waves are measured in two- to three-minute cycles, when doctors stop chest compressions and shocks to see if the patient's heart has started beating again.

“There was no movement and the atmosphere was dead. That’s when we started taking measurements. We found that the brains of clinically dead people generally had no signal, which is what we expected.”

“But, what's interesting is that even an hour after resuscitation began, we still saw some spikes in brain signals, similar to what a normal human brain experiences when talking or concentrating.”

These spikes include gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves.

Unfortunately, only 53 of the 567 patients were successfully resuscitated. Of those, 28 were interviewed about what details they recalled from the experience. Only 11 of the patients reported awareness during CPR, and only 6 reported a near-death experience.

However, those experiences were categorized alongside statements from 126 other stroke survivors not included in the study, and Mr Parnia said: “We were able to clearly show that the reported near-death experiences – including feeling separated from the body, looking back on one’s life, arriving at a place that felt like home and realizing the need to return – were consistent across all survivors worldwide .”

World - Near-death experiences and postmortem brain signals (Figure 3). — Many people see light during near-death experiences. Photo: odina/iStockphoto/Getty Images.

In addition, the study also recorded brain signals and compared them with brain signals from other studies on hallucinations and delusions and found them to be very different.

“We were able to conclude that the near-death experiences that were being recalled were real. They occurred at the same time as they died, and we detected some of the brain chemicals that were involved. These brainwave signals were not a trick of a dying brain, contrary to what many critics have claimed.”

Consciousness factor in research

Some industry experts were not convinced by the paper's conclusions, after it was presented at a scientific meeting in November 2022 and reported by media outlets.

“Reports of post-cardiac arrest brainwave findings have been exaggerated by the media,” said Bruce Greyson, professor and former instructor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville. “In fact, our team has not found any link between these brainwaves and conscious activity.”

“Patients who had near-death experiences did not have these brain waves, and those who had these brain waves did not have near-death experiences.”

Greyson is the author of “The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Research.” He and Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch researcher and author on near-death experiences, submitted comments to the scientific journal to be published alongside the study. They pointed out that “two of the 28 subjects interviewed had EEG data, but were not among those who could elaborate on the experience.”

“All that research shows is that in some patients, their brains have electrical signals that are constantly present at the same time that other patients claim to have near-death experiences.”

Mr. Parnia said the study's assertion that it could not match brain signals with near-death experiences in any one patient was accurate.

“Our sample size was not large enough. Most of the patients did not survive, and we did not have hundreds of survivors to interview. That is the reality. Of those who survived and had readable EEGs, 40% of them had signals that their brains had gone from having no activity to showing signs of consciousness.”

In addition, Mr. Parnia added, those who survive often have incomplete memories or forget the experience due to sedation measures in the intensive care unit.

“The absence of documented consciousness does not mean they were not conscious. Overall, what we are saying is, ‘This is a completely new field. We are entering uncharted territory.’ And the most important factor is that these are not hallucinations. These are real experiences while the patient is dying,” Parnia said.

Nguyen Quang Minh (according to CNN)

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