Jerome Taylor, The Independant Science, 2008
Floating above one's body or travelling down a long tunnel leading to a
white light has become such a clichéd description of near-death
experiences that many remain deeply suspicious of them. And yet time
and again people from different walks of life have described the same
scenario.
Traditionally debated by theologians and philosophers, the scientific
community is now taking a look in an attempt to answer one of life's
most enduring questions: what happens to our consciousness when we die?
A coalition of British and US scientists has launched an experiment to
study more than 1,500 heart attack patients over the next three years
to see if people with no heartbeat and brain activity can have genuine
"out-of-body" experiences.
Key to the experiment is an investigation into whether those who say
they briefly departed their body while clinically dead "physically"
left themselves behind or were simply imagining it during their
resuscitation.
The Awareness during Resuscitation experiment (Aware) is an expansion
of a pilot scheme run by the Human Consciousness Project at the
University of Southampton, which specialises in studying the human
brain, consciousness and death.
About 25 centres in the US and Britain, including Addenbrooke's
Hospital in Cambridge, University Hospital in Birmingham and the
Morriston Hospital in Swansea, will take part in the experiment. Over
the next three years about 15,000 patients will be brought to these
hospitals suffering from cardiac arrest. Around 1,500 are likely to be
resuscitated and hundreds will probably claim they had some sort of
out-of-body experience when they were clinically dead.
To test whether such experiences involve the mind leaving the body,
pictures will be placed around the areas of the hospital where heart
attacks occur most frequently, such as accident and emergency and
intensive care units. The pictures will only be visible from above. If
patients are able to describe these pictures, project leaders argue
that scientists will have to rethink how they understand the mind.
According to Dr Sam Parnia, director of the Human Consciousness
Project, the research will help dispel the idea that death itself is a
single event. "Death is not a specific moment," he says. "It is a
process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop
working and the brain ceases functioning – a medical condition termed
cardiac arrest, which from a biological viewpoint is synonymous with
clinical death.
"There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds
to an hour or more, in which medical efforts may succeed in restarting
the heart and reversing the dying process. What people experience
during this period provides a unique window into what we are all likely
to experience during the dying process."
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-possible-to-have-an-outofbodyexperience-935423.html
