Posted on 09/24/2008 6:14:06 AM PDT by edpc
A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain.
What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?
When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases - as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
“If I knew God I’d be Him.”
They might ask the dead person once they regain consciousness, what did you see looking down from the ceiling, and they would say, “I saw a picture of ghastly proportions. A hideous face multiplied many times over, it was what appeared as a face of the living dead. And then in a cold sweat I awoke.”
Beautiful! I’m gonna have to bookmark that!............
It was odd to see this article first thing this morning on Yahoo......since...my Father In Law died at 5:30am today .....but, please no condolences.....the only good thing I (or his son, my husband) could say about him is he fought in WWII. We did ponder where he might be RIGHT NOW.....
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