What is death? Is there life after death? Where is consciousness? And can science find the soul?
….Today, medical advances have allowed doctors to resuscitate people who in earlier times would have been irretrievably dead. In effect, medical intervention has pushed back what we call death….Nobody anticipated the number of patients who would come back with ….tales of out-of-body experience, travels down tunnels and encounters with angels or deceased loved ones. This phenomenon has labelled ‘near-death experience’ (NDE).
At first, all doctors dismissed such reports. The conventional medical explanation was hallucination, brought on by changes in the dying brain. Yet there was a problem with this interpretation. Such hallucinations could only occur if the brain maintained some function. One flat lined, the brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It could not hallucinate; it could not do anything at all.
That apparent paradox – that perceptions occur during NDEs when there is no functioning brain through which to perceive them – has scientists, theologians and ordinary folks groping for answers.
Such experiences should simply not happen if currently accepted scientific theories about life, death and consciousness are accurate. The NDE, some argue, should move science to make room for the possibility of a soul.
…..
While most medical researchers would not be caught dead uttering the word soul, some find the idea that NDEs are triggered by a failing brain to be inadequate. They speculate that NDEs may be evidence, not of an afterlife, but something as stunning: CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOT SOLEY RESIDE IN THE BRAIN.
In a study published in December 2001 in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel recounts the NDE of a clinically-dead, 44-year old cardiac arrest victim. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where doctors restarted his heart with defibrillators. A nurse removed the man’s dentures so a breathing could be inserted in his throat. Once stable, the man was moved to intensive care.
A week later the man saw the nurse who had removed his false teeth and recognized her – though during their only prior encounter, his condition had ranged from coma to clinical death.
“You took my dentures out of my mouth,” he told the nurse, and went on to accurately describe other details he claimed his disembodied self had viewed.
In an attempt to the gauge the frequency of NDEs, van Lommel and his fellow researchers interviewed 343 others who had suffered cardiac arrest and survived. “18% have a story of a very clear consciousness,” van Lommel says. These patients described everything from a general feeling of peace to full-fledged NDEs.
A study by British researchers published in the journal, Resuscitation, found that 11% had memory recall of the unconscious period. 6% of those resuscitated after cardiac arrest reported NDEs. Both van Lommel and the British researchers believe that these findings suggest consciousness could exist in the absence of a functioning brain. “You can compare the brain to a TV set,” says van Lommel. “The TV program is not in your TV set.”
So where is consciousness? Is it in every cell of the body?
“I think so,” says van Lommel. “We know that each day, 50 billion cells die.” He points out that intensive cell turnover means that, eventually, almost all the cells that make up “me” or “you” are new. And yet we don’t perceive ourselves as being any different from what we always were.
To van Lommel, it follows that “there must be a kind of communication between all your cells”. In other words, all your cells – not just brain cells, but trillions of others in muscle, skeleton, gut, skin and blood – “talk” to one another in a kind of network that keeps our experience of the consciousness going seamlessly even as billions of cell die and billions of other are produced. If that is so, then those cells still alive when someone is declared brain-dead may perceive events that are otherwise inexplicable.
That hypothesis may lead us away from the interpretation of NDEs as evidence of an afterlife. But it opens up fascinating horizons and a Pandora’s box of its own.
What does it mean if the mind persists after the brain is dead? Should we, for instance, rethink the harvesting of organs for transplant from the “brain-dead”? The NDEs force us to re-examine questions we thought we had the answers to: What is death? Where is consciousness? And can science find the soul?
Excerpts from “Life after Death: The Scientific case for the human soul” by Anita Bartholomew, Reader’s Digest, October 200
….Today, medical advances have allowed doctors to resuscitate people who in earlier times would have been irretrievably dead. In effect, medical intervention has pushed back what we call death….Nobody anticipated the number of patients who would come back with ….tales of out-of-body experience, travels down tunnels and encounters with angels or deceased loved ones. This phenomenon has labelled ‘near-death experience’ (NDE).
At first, all doctors dismissed such reports. The conventional medical explanation was hallucination, brought on by changes in the dying brain. Yet there was a problem with this interpretation. Such hallucinations could only occur if the brain maintained some function. One flat lined, the brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It could not hallucinate; it could not do anything at all.
That apparent paradox – that perceptions occur during NDEs when there is no functioning brain through which to perceive them – has scientists, theologians and ordinary folks groping for answers.
Such experiences should simply not happen if currently accepted scientific theories about life, death and consciousness are accurate. The NDE, some argue, should move science to make room for the possibility of a soul.
…..
While most medical researchers would not be caught dead uttering the word soul, some find the idea that NDEs are triggered by a failing brain to be inadequate. They speculate that NDEs may be evidence, not of an afterlife, but something as stunning: CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOT SOLEY RESIDE IN THE BRAIN.
In a study published in December 2001 in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel recounts the NDE of a clinically-dead, 44-year old cardiac arrest victim. He was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where doctors restarted his heart with defibrillators. A nurse removed the man’s dentures so a breathing could be inserted in his throat. Once stable, the man was moved to intensive care.
A week later the man saw the nurse who had removed his false teeth and recognized her – though during their only prior encounter, his condition had ranged from coma to clinical death.
“You took my dentures out of my mouth,” he told the nurse, and went on to accurately describe other details he claimed his disembodied self had viewed.
In an attempt to the gauge the frequency of NDEs, van Lommel and his fellow researchers interviewed 343 others who had suffered cardiac arrest and survived. “18% have a story of a very clear consciousness,” van Lommel says. These patients described everything from a general feeling of peace to full-fledged NDEs.
A study by British researchers published in the journal, Resuscitation, found that 11% had memory recall of the unconscious period. 6% of those resuscitated after cardiac arrest reported NDEs. Both van Lommel and the British researchers believe that these findings suggest consciousness could exist in the absence of a functioning brain. “You can compare the brain to a TV set,” says van Lommel. “The TV program is not in your TV set.”
So where is consciousness? Is it in every cell of the body?
“I think so,” says van Lommel. “We know that each day, 50 billion cells die.” He points out that intensive cell turnover means that, eventually, almost all the cells that make up “me” or “you” are new. And yet we don’t perceive ourselves as being any different from what we always were.
To van Lommel, it follows that “there must be a kind of communication between all your cells”. In other words, all your cells – not just brain cells, but trillions of others in muscle, skeleton, gut, skin and blood – “talk” to one another in a kind of network that keeps our experience of the consciousness going seamlessly even as billions of cell die and billions of other are produced. If that is so, then those cells still alive when someone is declared brain-dead may perceive events that are otherwise inexplicable.
That hypothesis may lead us away from the interpretation of NDEs as evidence of an afterlife. But it opens up fascinating horizons and a Pandora’s box of its own.
What does it mean if the mind persists after the brain is dead? Should we, for instance, rethink the harvesting of organs for transplant from the “brain-dead”? The NDEs force us to re-examine questions we thought we had the answers to: What is death? Where is consciousness? And can science find the soul?
Excerpts from “Life after Death: The Scientific case for the human soul” by Anita Bartholomew, Reader’s Digest, October 200
