We have all thought about what happens after we die.
Do we go to a place in the sky and are welcomed by family and friends?
Do we get reincarnated as a beautiful butterfly?
Is there nothing at all?
At this point in time, no one can definitively say what happens to your consciousness or
spirit after you die.
However, doctors such as Sam Parnia at NYU Langone Health have discovered evidence that
after the body dies, your consciousness may continue on.
Is this proof there is an afterlife?
Can science provide evidence for the existence of consciousness after the body shuts down?
Let's find out.
Someone is considered clinically dead when their heart stops beating.
It is called death by cardiopulmonary criteria.
Death occurs in this way because the heart stops pumping oxygen rich blood and nutrients
around the body, which causes all the organs and tissues to shut down.
Advances in medical practices such as CPR and defibrillators have made death reversible
in a sense.
It is believed right now that after the heart stops, you still have five to ten minutes
before you brain cells die and brain damage becomes irreversible.
However, recent research suggests that five to ten minutes worth of brain activity after
the heart stops beating is incorrect.
Instead, a person may have hours, or even days, of brain activity after their heart
stops.
If this is true, then what is happening in your brain when you are clinically declared
dead?
What is your consciousness doing?
This paradox is what medical researchers are trying to figure out.
What is consciousness?
Where does it lie within the body?
Your consciousness makes you, you.
It is undeniably a product of the brain, but we are not entirely sure where your consciousness
is manifested and kept within the nervous system.
Is it in the muscle tissue?
The synapsis?
Or is it the energy flowing between nerves that gives us consciousness?
Because of countless research studies, we know that when we have a thought parts of
our brain send chemical and electrical signals through the nerve cells.
Since thoughts and consciousness are closely related, our essence may be contained within
the cells and chemicals of the brain.
This means your sense of self, and what makes you you, could just be bundles of proteins
and organic compounds.
You may ask, “when the brain shuts down and the cells start to die does our consciousness
go with it?”
That’s the question Dr. Sam Parina and others are trying to figure out.
Can one brain cell hold your consciousness or do you need millions of brain cells to
create who you are? Parina states that there is no reason to believe that millions of cells
are necessary for your consciousness to exist.
It's difficult to quantify, but your consciousness may be contained in every one of your trillions
of cells.
Just think, every time you lose a brain cell you may be losing a part of yourself.
Spooky right?
If your brain hurts from thinking about what gives you consciousness, stay with me for
just a while longer.
Regardless of which part of the brain gives you emotions, personality, and your essence,
none of that matters when all of your cells die.
So what happens to you after the heart stops beating and your consciousness moves on?
Is there an afterlife?
Studies have shown that after someone is clinically dead their consciousness remains in or around
the body for a period of time.
Since death is not an off switch, but more of a slider, you aren’t alive one second
and dead the next.
When the heart stops, everything else in the body keeps going, then slowly starts to die
over time.
This means that for a significant time after death, death can be fully reversible.
Technically, there are loads of people walking around in their afterlife today.
People who have had heart attacks or gone into cardiac arrest have had their heart stop.
They were dead.
Doctors then brought them back to life.
Therefore, they are living post death, or after life.
But let's focus on what happens when your heart shuts down for good, when there is no
bringing you back.
What happens to your consciousness then?
If you are dead you should have no recollection of the time your heart stopped and when it
restarted.
However, this is not the case.
There have been many scientific reports that show people have lucid memories and experiences
even while their heart is not beating.
Accounts of patients seeing bright lights while they are clinically dead is common.
Even though the brain is not receiving oxygen, it would seem that there are still experiences
and memories being formed.
The process of making observations, and then being able to recall those observations, is
part of what makes you you.
Why do so many people who are dead see a bright light?
Maybe it is an experience that gives a glimpse into life after death.
People who can recall experiences after their heart stops beating are recalling events from
the afterlife.
It is entirely possible that the light people see after they die could be the first step
towards moving into the afterlife.
Other accounts have recorded people hearing full conversations after they were pronounced
dead.
When their heart is restarted and they regain the ability to talk, these people recount
what the doctors and nurses were talking about while trying to bring them back to life.
If the brain and your consciousness stop at the time of death this would not be possible.
Perhaps this is happening because the mind is gathering information to prepare your consciousness
for the afterlife.
There is evidence to suggest that a burst of energy flows through the brain after someone
dies.
This may be your consciousness transitioning to the afterlife.
The brain may be carrying out a yet unknown process that allows your consciousness to
prepare for whatever comes next.
After this burst of energy, your brain cells take days to reach a point where they are
no longer carrying out basic functions.
To be clear, this does not mean the person is not dead, they are, but their consciousness
may be transitioning to the after life.
Another commonality between people who have had post death experiences is that they often
see a guiding figure.
The figure varies between people and accounts, but it seems that there is someone or something
to guide you after death.
Is this figure just a way your mind copes with being dead, or is there more to it?
It has been suggested that these guiding figures might just be hallucinations.
It’s interesting to note that hallucinations are individualistic, so it is odd that multiple
people are having similar apparitions taking them into the afterlife.
The only reason we know of these mysterious figures is because people who have been brought
back to life through CPR or shocking the heart have told us.
Perhaps the guiding figure is a manifestation of the medical professionals that are bringing
these people back to life.
Or maybe they are something in the afterlife that helps us transition from being alive
to being dead.
Some of the most interesting and unexplainable afterlife experiences are accounts of people
who claim they had left their dead body and watched themselves be operated on from above.
It would be easy to chalk these stories up as hallucinations or that they are made up.
The problem is the patients can recount vivid details from their out of body experience.
On more than one occasion patients who have died can recall events that occured after
their heart stopped.
They could explain what the doctors were doing and objects in the room.
When medical professionals were asked if the memories the patients recalled were accurate,
they confirmed that they were.
How could someone who was clinically dead have seen and observed so many details?
We just don’t know.
Perhaps it has something to do with what our consciousness is made of.
Maybe after we die our consciousness leaves our body in a form of energy yet to be discovered.
This seems unbelievable, but it does serve as a preliminary hypothesis as to how people
could have out of body experiences.
As of yet there are no real good explanations for how people are able to make accurate observations
from outside of their bodies, especially when they are considered clinically dead.
You might wonder if these experiences are happening only in certain parts of the world
or in certain age groups?
It would seem not.
Post death experiences tend to be pretty universal across age groups and location.
Data gathered from every content and every age group have similarities when comparing
afterlife experiences.
When Dr. Parina interviewed a three year old boy who survived a cardiac arrest from an
epileptic seizure he said "When I died I saw a bright lamp."
This aligns to the stories of adults seeing a bright light when confronted by death.
The child also recounted that "grandma came to meet me and said I was going to be okay."
This is reminiscent to the guiding figure that many people see during their after life
experience.
Other children have described their experience after death as seeing a "being of light."
Maybe this is a marriage between the bright light and guiding figure.
There are no accounts of them describing the light as God, Jesus, or Santa Clause, because
as children, these concepts are not associated with death.
Yet younger children report after life experiences similar to older children and adults.
It is important to note that these experiences are not the same as sleep paralysis or “locked-in”
syndrome, where people are conscious and awake, but unable to speak or move.
Researchers have ruled this out due to the fact that the patient's heart has completely
stopped beating.
During paralysis the heart slows to a meditative state, but never stops.
The accounts from patients who have seen themselves on the operating table consistently state
they were in no pain, and oftentimes they were confused why everyone was worried about
them.
It is almost as if when you die your mind and consciousness relaxes, and all of the
pain your body feels is cut off from your mind.
Maybe this shows that your consciousness is not a part of the body at all, but just contained
within it waiting to be set free.
It is uncanny events like these that make Dr. Sam Parnia hypothesize that the psyche
or “self” may not originate in the brain at all, but could possibly be a separate undiscovered
entity.
Parnia believes that consciousness could be something similar in nature to electromagnetic
radiation, like radio waves and visible light.
There is no definitive evidence for what makes up consciousness or your psyche.
But if it was something similar to energy waves, that would help explain observations
that occur from outside the body because energy is not confined to a corporeal form.
Then again, if that’s the case why can’t we just shoot our conscious selves out of
our brain any time we want?
Not all after life experiences are equal or pleasent.
During a study one man recounted that when his heart stopped beating, and the doctors
were trying to bring him back to life, he experienced the guiding figure.
Except in this case it was an unfamiliar woman.
She was floating and beckoning him to join her from the ceiling in the corner of the
room.
Kind of creepy when you think about it.
The man remembers thinking, “I can’t get up there.”
Then as he finished the thought he suddenly was “up there, looking down” at himself.
He saw his blood pressure being taken and a breathing tube put into his mouth.
The nurse was giving him CPR.
He could accurately describe the people, sounds, and events leading up to his resuscitation.
Other people have recounted being sucked into a deep black void.
Almost like a star being sucked into a blackhole and torn apart.
Clearly not the most reassuring after life experience.
But it could be worse.
There are others who have seen grotesque creatures that wail and moan in pain.
They beckon the person towards them.
Luckily those people were brought back to life before they were forced to follow the
creatures.
But it begs the question…
what happens to the people who experience these visions and don’t get pulled out of
it by doctors restarting their heart?
Dr. Parnia is not a religious man and insists that his experiments are not to prove there
is a supernatural afterlife.
Instead, he aims to understand what happens to the consciousness after the body dies to
avoid “disorders of the consciousness.”
This includes patients who are left in a permanent vegitative state after their brain is starved
too long for oxygen.
Parnia wants to prevent cases like this, while also testing the accuracy of after life experiences
using a scientific approach.
Research shows that people who have these after death experiences are often transformed
by the experience itself.
They change their lifestyle to help others and become less self-centered.
Parina says patients who have died and have been brought back to life “view the world
in a different way.”
People who have an after life experience tend to have a shift in perspective that focuses
on their humanity.
Parnia also reports that following an after life experience people become more empathetic
and reflective on things they’ve done.
Especially if their actions have hurt others.
They often describe the experience from the other person’s perspective, which causes
emotional distress to themselves.
Is this our consciousness reaching out to another consciousness?
Do people who have experienced death literally have a more connected world view?
Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, scientists are finding more and more evidence
that consciousness remains even after the body dies.
Experiences that people have had while clinically dead are hard to explain at this moment in
time.
It would seem that the frequency of shared after life experiences across the world and
age groups would indicate something happens to you after you are clinically dead.
We don’t know what is in store for us after this life, but we do know that death of the
body is not the end for our consciousness, maybe not even by a long shot.
If talking about death doesn’t freak you out too much, you should check out our video
on What Happens After You Die?
If death does freak you out, check out one of our funny challenges videos like I Didn't
Wear Underwear For A Month And This Is What Happened.
It is sure to make you laugh!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!