Can A Person Be Aware of His Death?
The brain continues to function after the heart stops beating, and a dead person may be aware that he is dead a research claim.
A person is officially considered dead once his heart stops beating, but a research has revealed that the brain continues to function even just for a short time despite the person has been declared dead.
According to Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone School of Medicine in New York City, people in the first phase of death may still experience some form of consciousness, which means they can be aware that they are already dead.
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Parnia has done the largest study on the topic of near-death experiences and continues to study how the brain functions after death. Upon talking with cardiac arrest patients, doctors, and nurses, he and his team discovered that those who flatlined still had their brain functioning even after they had been declared dead. According to Parnia, some patients he had talked with revealed that they could recall conversations that the doctors and nurses were having even after their heart had stopped beating.
"They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they'll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them," Parnia said.
Because of the research, Parnia suspects that the brain does not only continue to function after a person dies, but the person may also be fully aware that he is dead as the brain continues to do its job to a certain extent. However, he and his team are still to establish what exactly people experience after going through death and continue their research by monitoring the brain from "beyond the threshold of death" in order to better aid resuscitation.
"We're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die," Parnia revealed.
