Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies

[Purd_Werfect]

There’s an interesting article here in which a scientist has claimed to find clear evidence of thought continuing in folks who are considered clinically brain dead. The evidence is apparently compelling enough that funding for further studies has been ponied up.

“The studies are very significant 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,” said Sam Parnia in a Reuters interview. Parnia is one of two doctors from Southampton General Hospital in England who have been studying so-called near-death experiences (NDEs). “We need to do much larger-scale studies, but the possibility is certainly there” to suggest that consciousness, or the soul, continues to think and reason even if a person’s heart has stopped, he is not breathing and he has no brain activity, Parnia said.

What’s your take on this? Excitement? BS? Wait and See? Other?

[jk1245]

Interesting topic…

It seems to me that “lucid thought processes, reasoning, and memory formation” would indicate that the brain is NOT dead, by definition. Maybe the concept of brain death needs to be clarified more. Maybe the way THEY were measuring braind death was incorrect. Put me in the “wait and see” camp, I guess.

[Tornado_Siren]

I read this article as well. Here is my one question.

Are they getting these facts from what the patients SAID they were thinking or seeing after they died? If so, then we are just talking about all the after death experiences we have been hearing about forever. Afraid I need a little more detail on this one. I can die, and be brought back, and tell all sorts of tales about what I was thinking, what I was seeing, and how Aunt Martha was beckoning me forward.

Lets be realistic here folks. You cannot do a scientific study on what people claim they saw, heard, or thought about after they died. There is no control group.

Now, if the study consisted of something else, then I would be glad to hear about it.

[sk8rixtx]

Here’s a thought, lets not tell these NDE victims that they had near death experiences and let them tell us what happened while they were “asleep” so they don’t get all “I SAW GOD!( )” on us.

Very interesting topic, but, I’d say wait and see until more research is done.

[bughunter]

Yeah, I read this a while ago and was searching for it again this week - thanks.

I found two major problems with this article. The doctor’s conclusions are very unscientific.

First, the assumtion that there was “no brain function.” The correct statement should have been, “there was no measureable brain function.” There’s an important difference. The study too quickly ignores the possibility that there is indeed brain function that isn’t being measured. In fact for one to form permanent memories, brain function must be occurring, so the brain isn’t dead after all… jk1245 picked up on this paradox, too.

Secondly, the good doctor Parnia too easily dismissed the question of exactly when these memories are formed. He has no evidence upon which to exclude the possiblity that they are formed upon or after resuscitation other than anecdotal discussions with trauma patients.

And there are a bunch of minor niggling problems with the article, too, such as the suggestibility of the patients - like the pagan seeing a “mystical being,” and the child, who is clearly old enough to have seen Saturday morning cartoon depictions of balloon-like ghosts leaving dead Itchies and Scratchies.

Clearly there is more involved to the mind than a bunch of juices flowing and membrane potentials propogating; philosophers call it an “emergent process.” And there’s a lot yet to be learned about how the process of mind emerges from the physical seat of consciousness, but this isn’t a scientific examination of it by any means.

I think the main hypothesis that should be drawn from this study is that our conditions for assigning clinical brain death are too liberal. Further study should be towards finding a better, more sensitive way to measure brain function, and a study to see if it is worthwhile to extend resuscitation attempts beyond clinical brain death.

[ENugent]

I think it just means he read Passage. Spooky.

[MEBuckner]

Of those, four were labeled NDEs in that they reported lucid memories of thinking, reasoning, moving about and communicating with others after doctors determined their brains were not functioning.

How exactly was it determined when these experiences occured, and that they actually occured during the period of “brain death”?

For centuries, people have reported having near-death experiences, but in Parnia’s study none of the patients were found to have received low oxygen levels, which some skeptics believe may contribute to the phenomenon. When the brain is deprived of oxygen, people become totally confused, thrash around and usually have no memories at all, Parnia said. “Here you have a severe insult to the brain but perfect memory.”

They weren’t deprived of oxygen? I thought they were heart attack patients? Why did they have “brain death” in the first place, if they weren’t subjected to low oxygen levels? Was that just some kind of stupid mistake by the reporter who wrote the article?

Skeptics have also suggested that patients’ memories occurred during the moments they were leaving or returning to consciousness. But Parnia said that when the brain is traumatized by a seizure or car wreck, the patient generally does not remember moments just before or after losing consciousness.

Instead, there is usually a memory lapse of hours or days. “Talk to them. They’ll tell you something like: ‘I just remember seeing the car and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital,’” he said. “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,” he added.

This seems awfully weak. The contention of skeptics is that NDE’s are basically a kind of hallucination. Maybe severe trauma causes one to lose the ability to remember actual events, and to have a sort of hallucination, which you can remember. After all, people who are asleep by and large are unaware of what’s going on around them, and therefore won’t remember something that happened in the room while they were sleeping, but they generally have dreams, which they do remember.

Of course, the Good Doctor Parnia probably thinks that dreams are when people’s souls fly away to a different astral plane.

His parents contacted Parnia after the boy "drew a picture of himself as if out of his body looking down at himself.

Well, I don’t really know how to draw a picture of myself except from an “out-of-body” perspective. I mean, otherwise you’d have this weird picture of just my hands. I guess what they’re saying is that the kid drew it from a point of view that was up in the air?

In the thread Life after Death? (Near death experience), we sort of kicked around the idea of empirically verifiable evidence for this stuff. It would be interesting if the guys in the emergency room or the trauma ward or whatever would just stick a sign on top of a file cabinet or something. Then, if a patient was “clinically dead” and reported having an NDE later, they could say “Hey, that’s really interesting! You were floating above your body, looking down at the operating room? Say, we’re conducting a little experiment–there’s a sign over on top of that filing cabinet there. What’s it say?”

[ssj_man2k]

It might be possible for certain parts of the brain to stay alive while the rest is dead, as long as it has oxygen. The mondula oblongata (sp?) could certainly be non-functional, but as long as other parts have oxygen, i think they could still work.

I’m not sure though. Put me in the wait and see section.