A study suggests we might still be aware after “Time of Death”

In 1616, the smartest people alive were certain the sun orbited us. In 1850, doctors believed a woman’s uterus could literally wander up to her brain and cause madness. And right up until the 1980s, mainstream science held that dogs didn’t really experience joy.

Every generation inherits a set of “settled” facts, builds a civilization on top of them, and then watches some poor scientist get laughed out of a conference for suggesting the framework might be wrong. We keep doing this, and we keep being surprised when we do.

People tend to unconsciously treat science as a finished volume where observations are gathered, hypotheses are tested, conclusions are reviewed and stamped with approval. Case closed.

Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t jive with that vision of forced certainty. Which brings us to a new study that is forcing is to reconsider what we know about death.

For decades, the medical model has treated death as essentially binary: the heart stops beating, the brain ceases electrical activity, and the system shuts down. A clean concept, perfect for a textbook diagram or PowerPoint slide, that is almost certainly incorrect.

In 2023, Dr. Sam Parnia and colleagues at NYU Langone conducted a remarkably thought-provoking study in medical research. They analyzed more than 550 patients who experienced cardiac arrest in hospital settings. These patients were people whose hearts and breathing had stopped and who, by traditional definitions, were clinically dead.

Here’s what they found:

Up to an hour into CPR, when a patient was no longer showing signs of life, some brains were still active.

Researchers identified three categories of experiences that should not exist if our traditional understanding is accurate.

First: CPR-induced consciousness. Some patients regained awareness during chest compressions, with eyes opening and limbs moving, even though their hearts were technically stopped. A few attempted to communicate with the medical team while resuscitation was underway.

Second: dream-like imagery. Some survivors described movie-like experiences with vivid, fully-formed scenes (aka not the foggy dreams often associated with anesthesia). Interestingly, accounts from individuals who recovered from longterm medically-induced comas share similar qualities.

Third: recalled experiences during cardiac arrest. Several patients described an encompassing awareness of the room around them, often accompanied by an overwhelming sense of peace. These experiences reportedly occurred during times when EEG readings would normally be expected to flatline. Yet EEG monitoring instead revealed bursts of alpha, beta, and gamma brain waves occurring up to an hour after cardiac arrest, during periods of severe oxygen deprivation.

In other words, when the brain had its oxygen cut and should have been shutting down, it produced wave patterns typically associated with memory retrieval, conscious perception, and complex cognitive processing. In some measurable sense, these brains were displaying signatures of highly organized activity well after the moment we traditionally call death.

While I have spent most of my adult life immersed in science research, I have also sat in a hospital room and watched a family member who was unresponsive and end-of-life shed a single tear when their child’s voice entered the room. I remember feeling surprised. And, while medicine would call this a reflexive lacrimal response (a mechanical reaction), emerging research makes that explanation increasingly difficult to maintain with absolute confidence.

What’s fascinating is that other cultures and many older cultures never required a peer-reviewed study to suspect that something still remained in a human within those final hours. For example, numerous traditions observed waiting periods of up to three days before burial. The reasoning varied, but the underlying intuition for some cultures was that the transition from life to death might not be at the point circulation stops. These cultures believed that whatever makes a person uniquely themselves did not simply cut like a flipped power switch.

The universe remains largely unexplored by human understanding. I often wonder if our skulls (limited in size as evidenced by the three pounds of densely folded neural tissue stuffed into it) have the capacity to fully grasp the nature of existence, or whether attempting to do so resembles trying to explain the internet to an ant colony.

For now, though, one assumption may deserve retirement: the idea that when a heart stops beating and circulation ceases, a person is gone. Death may be something closer to a gradual dimming, where the person we love, for a little time anyway, remains peacefully alive in the room.