Where does death lie?

Why new evidence matters

Photo: Anna Schvets (Pexels.com)

Because hospitals can resuscitate the dead better than they used to, and much longer after the death event, the medical establishment is beginning to redefine death. Time was, cessation of heartbeat sufficed for the coroner. In the mid-1960’s, when restarting hearts became possible, patients returning from death brought stories with them, of what death was like. This suggested that there was brain-death after cardiac death, with some mental activity before oxygen-starved neurons died. Details of their stories were consistent enough, remembered well enough, and psychologically transformative enough, that by the 1970’s opinions emerged and diverged about their significance. Perhaps these experiences were supernatural, or perhaps they were natural spasms of perishing intellects. Brains, as I myself learned in school, only last a few minutes without air, so this short horizon made it difficult to assess the true value of dying stories.

Brain-death actually turns out to take hours, and maybe even days. Out at the distal end of this, strange things also seem to happen, and they suggest, surprisingly, that mental activity, and consciousness itself, is not completely dependent on biology.

This is the thrust of recent work within the Parnia Lab at NYU’s Langone Health center. Death, says Dr. Sam Parnia, professor of medicine there, appears not to be an end, but the start of something new, and something extraordinary. You can see a synopsis of that research here:

Near-death experiences, he says, are better thought of as ‘Recalled Experiences of Death’.

Certainly, the brain does eventually die. But some cells, notably stem cells, go dormant in cadavers, and can last a very long time. What’s more, they can be revived, and encouraged in petri dishes to grow and multiply. They form tiny brain ‘organoids’, about the size and color of puffed rice, that function metabolically. This may help explain brain activity long after classic death. Can whole brains be revivified? It was partly done, in 2019, with pig brains, by a team at Yale. So much functionality was restored, even after a day since slaughterhouse decapitation, that the team stopped the experiment, fearing a return to brain consciousness. You can see their article in Nature, here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1099-1

Human brains are, in any case, being brought back online sometimes hours after they flatlined by ordinary imaging protocols. Except that they don’t exactly flatline. Some time after the usual zero-signal, the one you see in movies, brain activity flares, in regions not well mapped yet, and not known for much activity in daily living, but recognised as having something to do with memory and other forms of cognition. What fuel these cells run on is certainly beyond me. Resuscitating brains this late in the death process is tricky. Flooding them with oxygen risks ‘re-perfusion injury’. But it can be done.

Here’s where things get really interesting. Returning patients’ narratives of this period of brain activity turns preternatural. Yes, they report heightened consciousness, remarkable clarity of thought; yes, they speak commonly of experiencing a guided life-review, and they usually return with a message of some sort, or a sense of mission; and yes, they always remember feeling calm about it. (None of this resembles the wild disorder of hallucinations or drug reactions, which medical staff also see in near-death patients.)

More strikingly, they sometimes recall leaving their bodies, and they know things afterward that they shouldn’t be able to know. Dr. Tom Aufderheide, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin and one of the patients interviewed in the Parnia documentary above, recalls such an event on his first day as a doctor. He started his shift with a second-year resident, who assured him that he would stay alongside the whole 36 hours. He didn’t. Young Dr. Aufderheide’s very first patient arrested, and for a time was dead by cardiac criteria. The doctor took the patient’s wife down the hall, and told her not to hope for a happy ending. He returned to the unconscious patient’s side, and, the patient’s lunch having arrived, he ate it. He fretted silently about having been abandoned by his resident supervisor. He was careful not to verbalise this embarrassing insecurity to anyone.

A month later, the man, who did recover in the end, had a word to say to Dr. Aufderheide. Look here, he said. ‘I followed you down the hall with my wife, and I really thought you could have been more encouraging.’ Nor was he happy about watching the doctor eat his lunch. Finally, he said, ‘Here I was, dying in front of you, and you were feeling sorry for yourself about being abandoned by your supervisor.’  

What is the intersection of cell-life and consciousness? These stories about drifting around and perceiving things, even unspoken thought-things, are common in the RED narrative. How does perception happen without perception organs? Is there such a thing as non-biological life, as we might as well call it? Dr. Parnia says one thing seems clear, at least. Death, all evidence says, does not mean the annihilation of the self. Does selfhood persist even beyond this remarkable last spate of brain activity, when the brain is finally dust and soil? Where, then, does selfhood come from?

Those of us who have encountered spirits – I’ll just say it clearly – are not surprised by any of this, and we have the same questions, in the end, as Dr. Parnia’s people do. Those of us in the mystical prayer tradition who have transcendent experiences aren’t surprised either. And when we in faith traditions read about preternatural events in scriptures, we’re perfectly happy to believe they happened. Are spiritual experiences really just little episodes of the remarkable brain disinhibition that the NYU team has now shown in the hours after death? If they are, does that render them non-spiritual?

I don’t think it matters. If something is true, as Richard Rohr says, it’s all right that we see it in places that aren’t part of a strictly spiritual conversation. We should be seeing it in science, actually, and everywhere else, too.