If it can be proven that this period of consciousness has indeed taken

“If it can be proven that this period of consciousness has indeed taken place during cardiac arrest, it will have huge implications.”But not everyone in the scientific world is prepared to accept that the mind and the brain might be separate entities. This is one of the arguments Dr Parnia wants to verify, by hiding his test objects in places that are only visible from above. So are they really dead? This has been a bone of contention throughout the whole NDE field. Surely this is just a dream? An hallucination caused by a brain starved of oxygen and sugar? But Dr Parnia points to studies that have shown that during cardiac arrest and advanced cardiac life support, global brain function ceases. EEG studies have shown that electrical activity in the brain ceases at least 10 seconds prior to the heart stopping, and doesn’t show any activity for up to two hours after the heart has been started again.Of course, there’s nothing to say that these experiences don’t happen during the recovery phase.

These experiences are fairly consistent, regardless of culture, age or religious conviction.These people have all been dead, in a clinical sense – in other words, they have no pulse, and their pupils are fixed and don’t react to strong light Of course, they’re not brain dead There’s no coming back from brain death. At some point on this journey, they get a strong pull to go back, because it’s not their time yet. They will place objects out of the line of sight of cardiac patients and ask them to report on what they saw during their out-of-body experience Smaller studies have so far proved inconclusive. Dr Parnia and Dr Fenwick’s study will cover at least a dozen hospitals in the UK.Many people who have an NDE have reported similar experiences: a feeling of floating out of the body; a journey through a dark tunnel; a light at the end of the tunnel; feelings of indescribable joy, love and peace. Sometimes they meet a supernatural being, maybe Jesus or Buddha There may be a reunion with deceased relatives or friends There is often a review of their life.

People have made up their minds: either they believe NDE to be real, or they think it’s just New Age mumbo jumbo; opinions have become entrenched. Nevertheless, serious scientific research has been going on in the USA, the UK and Holland.In the UK, Dr Sam Parnia, of Southampton University, and Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist, are about to embark on a large-scale study that will, among other things, look at the phenomenon of out-of-body experience (or, to use the medical parlance, “veridical perception”). As many as one in 10 patients who recover from cardiac-arrest report a near-death experience (NDE), a term that came into common use in 1975 after the American physician, Raymond Moody, published the seminal book on NDE, Life after Life It sold more than 13 million copies. “I was going towards these lights and it was wonderful, it was peaceful, and then all of a sudden, a voice said to me: ‘Come on you silly old cow, it’s not your turn yet.’ And I was back in my body Back in pain, with a crash team round me.