Life After Death? You Might Be Surprised What This Study Found

Life After Death? You Might Be Surprised What This Study Found

in Faith, News, Opinion / by Sean Brown / on October 8, 2014 at 10:54 am /

A team of British researchers have spent the last four years conducting the largest-ever study on whether life continues after death, and the results are quite remarkable.
The UK Independent reports that the team analyzed the experiences of cardiac arrest patients and found that nearly 40 percent of them described having a sort of “awareness” at the same time they were clinically dead. Pretty cool, right?
For the longest time, it’s been believed that about 20 or 30 seconds after the heart stops beating, brain function ceases and it’s impossible to be aware of anything after that point. But the latest study provided scientists with compelling evidence that not only were patients experiencing real events for up to three minutes after their heart stopped, they were able to accurately recall those events after being brought back to life.
The study, published to the medical journal Resuscitation, was led by Dr. Sam Parnia from the State University of New York and involved 2026 patients from 15 different hospitals in the U.S., UK, and Austria.

Of the surviving victims of heart attacks, 46 percent experienced a wide range of mental recollections, 9 percent had experiences that were compatible with traditional near-death experiences, and 2 percent experienced full awareness with being able to explicitly recall “seeing” and “hearing” events or having out-of-body experiences.
Parnia had previously attributed near-death experiences to hallucinatory events; however, after completing the study, his tune has changed. Speaking to The Telegraph, he described the case of a 57-year-old social worker who described witnessing his resuscitation from the corner of the room.
“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” he said. “But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes. The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three-minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for,” Parnia added, “He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”
Parnia now believes that the results of his study “now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice” into what happens once our hearts stop beating.
So what do you believe happens once we die?