Near Death Experience Study Finds Brain Has Broad Range of Reactions to Death
A long tunnel with a light at the end? A vivid vision of heaven or hell? Hovering over your own body on the operating table? Or nothing at all? Since we’ve had the technology to resuscitate people after death, many have come back to life with stories of near-death experiences that inspired everything from curiosity to full-blown religious movements such as young Colton Burpo’s vision that inspired the book Heaven is For Real. Researchers have now published results of largest ever look at this phenomenon of people who say they continue to experience awareness when they are technically dead. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK, recorded the experiences of 2060 cardiac arrest patients in the U.S., UK and Austria. They found that reactions ranged non-existent, to memories and emotional reactions including “fearful” experiences, to in very rare cases full out-of-body experiences. First, the researchers say, it’s important to understand what death actually means, Dr. Sam Parnia, Assistant Professor of Critical Care