According to a Reuters news bulletin, two British doctors presented research evidence at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that consciousness keeps on, even when the patient is clinically dead.[1] The research, conducted on victims of heart attacks, is actually the first in which science has actually proved that cognition does not stop when the brain is no longer functioning.

The two authors of the study were Dr. Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist consultant at London's Institute of Psychiatry, and Dr. Sam Parnia, of Southampton General Hospital. ``The studies are very significant,'' Dr. Parnia told Reuters, ''in that we have a group of people with no brain function ... who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to function.''

Does the soul keep thinking and reasoning, even when the heart and breath have stopped and there is no brainwave activity? ``We need to do much larger-scale studies,'' Dr. Parnia reportedly told Reuters, ''but the possibility is certainly there.''

According to Parnia, the initial study consisted of 63 heart attack patients who had been pronounced dead and then revived. Upon interviewing them within a week of this experience, it was found that seven had memories, and of those, four had experiences that met the strict Greyson scale criteria for NDE's: They recalled feelings of peace and joy, time speeded up, heightened senses, lost awareness of body, seeing a bright light, entering another world, encountering a mystical being or deceased relative, and coming to a point of no return.

The Skeptics' Explanations Don't Work

Some skeptics believe that the near-death experience is caused by low oxygen, but as we have reported elsewhere in this magazine, this is not borne out by the facts. In the case of this research study, it is known that none of the patients had low oxygen levels. Anyway, says Parnia, people who suffer oxygen deprivation suffer from confusion, and they ''thrash around.'' Also, they usually have no memories at all of the experience. ``Here,'' Parnia commented, ''you have a severe insult to the brain, but perfect memory.''

It is also put forth by skeptics that the near-death experience can be explained by memories that happen at the exit or entry point of consciousness. But again, this is not borne out by other evidence.

When the brain suffers trauma that causes a loss of consciousness, according to Parnia, people generally have amnesia which can last for hours or even days. ''Talk to them,'' Parnia says. ''They'll tell you something like: I just remember seeing the car and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital.' With cardiac arrest, the insult to the brain is so severe it stops the brain completely. Therefore, I would expect profound memory loss before and after the incident.''

When You Die You See a Bright Light

Based on their first experimental study, Parnia and his colleagues have learned of more than 3,500 cases where people had lucid memories of times when they were clinically dead. Many times, he said, patients hesitated to report their experiences, being apprehensive that others would question their sanity.

In one amazing case, a child had a seizure where his heart stopped. He was revived, and later drew a picture of himself looking down on his own body. The parents sent this picture to Parnia. ''It was drawn like there was a balloon stuck to him,'' Parnia said. ''When they asked what the balloon was he said, 'When you die you see a bright light and you are connected to a cord.' He wasn't even three when he had the experience.''

``What his parents noticed,'' Parnia added, ''was that after he had been discharged from the hospital, six months after the incident, he kept drawing the same scene.''

Brain, Mind, and Soul

Scientists have formerly believed that the brain cannot sustain lucid thought or form lasting memories when the person is unconscious, which simply means, according to Parnia, that ''nobody fully grasps how the brain generates thoughts. The brain itself is made up of cells, like all the body's organs, and is not really capable of producing the subjective phenomenon of thought that people have.''

Parnia's conclusion: Human consciousness may work independently of the brain, using the gray matter as a mechanism to manifest the thoughts, just as a television set translates waves in the air into picture and sound. Just because the brain is damaged does not necessarily mean that the ''mind'' is affected.

Parnia points out that people who have NDE's do not say, ''I had this pain and the next thing I knew my Soul left me.'' Instead, they find themselves outside their bodies, looking down on the attempts to revive them and realizing that they don't want to go back.

Before conducting this study, Dr. Sam Parnia himself was a skeptic. No more. Eventually, he now feels, research may reveal the existence of the Soul.

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