Death and the possibility of an afterlife
have fascinated artists, philosophers,
and scientists throughout history.
Fear,
hope,
dread,
these are all things we might feel when
we ponder what happens to us after we die.
But what does science actually
know about the afterlife?
If we knew that we went somewhere
after we died,
Death is not as straightforward
as you might think.
The term ‘clinical death’ wasn’t even coined
until 1846, by Dr. Eugène Bouchut.
He suggested that if you listened
through a stethoscope,
and there was no heartbeat for two minutes,
the patient was clinically dead.
Today, determining whether death has
occurred is more complicated.
The heart can continue to beat for
a full week after the brain dies.
This was shown by UCLA's 1998 study.
These 175 bodies were still functioning
one week after brain death.
called 'beating heart cadavers,'
Were they able to make the final jump into the afterlife?
We can’t tell for sure.
The closest we can get to discovering
concrete answers
is by looking at near-death experiences.
And that’s just in one country.
Stories across the globe describe
the same sort of phenomena happening around
the time of death, either being surrounded
by a bright light,
or seeing a being made of bright light.
This experience is so prevalent that
Bruce Greyson developed the Greyson NDE Scale in 1983.
This scale determines if a person had a
near-death experience based on their answers
to 16 questions, such as,
In a four-year study of awareness during resuscitation,
the University of Southampton found that
39 percent of cardiac arrest survivors claimed
to have been aware of their surroundings,
before their heart was restarted.
Yet in this study,
people claimed they were conscious for up to
three minutes after their heart stopped.
The survivors' experiences included
time slowing down or speeding up,
out of body experiences,
or a peaceful feeling.
Some even had distinct memories of their surroundings.
These experiences make sense when
you know that brain activity actually spikes
around the time of death.
A 2010 study from the George Washington University Medical Center
studied the EEGs, or electroencephalograms,
of seven critically ill patients
as they were taken off life support.
The patients showed a spike of neural activity near death
that lasted from 30 seconds to three minutes.
Are these spikes in mental activity
proof of an afterlife?
The short answer is no.
Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg speculates
that our parasympathetic nervous system,
and sympathetic nervous system,
begin operating at full speed in near-death experiences
These two systems rarely work side by side,
and the combination could create
all those other-worldly experiences that people report.
But this, too, is just a theory.
That could depend on the type of afterlife.
Let's say there are different characteristics of an afterlife,
and the way you lived on Earth
determined where you go after death.
If this was a hard fact that everyone knew,
then we would probably strive to be much better people.
People would have different opinions about
what factors would be the most rewarded
in the afterlife,
and this would be a point of conflict.
There might even be a whole new field of
science dedicated to discovering the
rules of the afterlife.
But what if the opposite is discovered?
What if there is just one place where everyone goes, no matter what they did while alive?
Researchers have found that when reminded of death,
people tend to shop more,
drink more,
eat more,
smoke more…
In other words, they live it up.
This doesn’t bode well for a reality where
the afterlife is just one happy, responsibility-free destination.
It would be easy for people to decide that what happened on Earth,
or to the Earth,
doesn’t really matter.
There could even be an increase in reckless
behavior and suicide.
Death cults, anyone?
Even if scientists proved the existence of an afterlife,
the reality is that they wouldn’t know how that afterlife functioned.
The only people who would know
what it was like would be, well, dead.
People’s understanding about the afterlife
would still be formed by their personal beliefs.
We will probably never know if there is an afterlife.
But luckily for us,
we have longer to live than ever before.
A century ago, the average life expectancy dipped
as low as age 23 in countries like South Korea and India.
It would be wise for us to use our longer lifespans
to do good on the Earth that we have.
The afterlife may or may not exist,
but the world that we live in today definitely does.
And who knows?
Maybe someday we won’t think twice about the afterlife
because we’ll have found a way to become immortal.