Death is the mysterious journey all living organisms must
take at the end of their lives. Many people claim to know for sure what happens
at the end of that journey. Religious people talk about the certainty of
meeting God in heaven, or Satan in hell. The atheo-skeptics are convinced that
their death results in complete oblivion forever; the ultimate termination of
their existence. However if any person is being honest they will simply have to
admit that they don't know for sure. The biological study of dying people is
extremely difficult for many practical and ethical reasons. Usually a dying
person is either being urgently treated by medical teams in an attempt to save
their life, or they are lying peacefully in bed with their grieving family
gathered round. As I say here, this calls into question many of the conclusions
made during such research projects: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/proof-of-life-after-death.html.
Doctors also disagree considerably on the definition of death. When does it
occur? Where is the threshold over which a person can be unquestionably
categorized as dead? Since the invention of resuscitation technology another
very important question is: how far along the path to death do you have to go
before it becomes irreversible and you can no longer turn back? The vacillating
boundary between life and death has shifted over the years. Before
resuscitation you were declared dead simply when your heart stopped. Today it
is after resuscitation fails. When the heart stops beating the brain falls instantly
into a dormant state. Electrical activity drops very quickly to almost nothing;
certainly below that which can be detected on a clinical electroencephalograph.
This means the patient is completely unconscious. If the heart cannot be
restarted then eventually the brain's shutdown becomes permanent, and that is
the current conventional definition of death. The nature of the brain state
during those crucial few minutes are the battleground over which different
theories regarding near-death experiences is being fought, and in the
background links below I address the issue in more detail. This matter has been
further complicated by the publication of the results of a new research project
carried out by the University of Western
Ontario Canada .
The team of nine scientists discovered that in some cases very limited brain
activity continued for more than ten minutes after intensive care life support
systems had been withdrawn. If this is true then it has profound implications,
both scientific and legal. In other words the frontier between the lands of the
living and the dead will once again become mobile and hazy. Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/what-happens-die-brain-activity-life-heart-beating-death-after-eeg-study-research-a7620131.html.
It's disturbing to think that in my days as a hospital
porter I might have transported people to the mortuary whose brains were still
ticking over, however tenuously. This information will change the way we view
procedures like organ harvests for donation and when it's the right time to
"pull the plug" on intensive care patients. Nevertheless, this is a
very limited experiment indeed. Only four patients were involved and only one
of those showed any post-mortem cerebral activity. A far wider follow-up
programme will need to be done. The kind of EEG reading detected was of
"delta waves"; what normally happens during deep sleep, therefore
this could not have generated any conscious awareness. The patient was still
dead on a practical level. I wonder if anybody in secret government programmes
is observing this discovery. It's possible they already know far more about it
and are finding practical applications similar to the fictional Dr Frankenstein,
creating zombie-like slaves, see here for detail: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/resident-evil-final-chapter-film-review.html
and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/real-zombies-2015.html.
Does this reflect on near-death experience studies at all? Skeptic materialists
like Dr Susan Blackmore and Dr Olaf Blanke claim that the NDE is caused by
residual brain activity during cardiac arrest beyond the sensitivity of a
clinical EEG, conflation of memories during recovery, the release of neurochemicals
due to cerebral trauma and a disassociation with a person's location. They cite
experiments done on rats that show a surge of brain activity after cardiac
arrest and just before death; but no similar effect has been observed in
humans. This probably makes no difference to the various theories, promotions
and dismissals about consciousness and its ability to exist independently from
a living human body; but, if this information is confirmed, it does mean we'll
have to reassess how we treat people who are on the brink of death. Palliative
care will have to be completely overhauled.
See here for
background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/return-from-dead.html.
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