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Consciousness may extend beyond the current definition of death, enduring even after the heart stops and the brain falls silent, a bombshell study claims. US researchers who reviewed cases of near-death experiences and animal experiments have called for death to be redefined as a “negotiable condition”.
Anna Fowler, a student researcher at Arizona State University, said the findings suggest that “death unfolds as a process, rather than an instantaneous event”. She added: “Emerging evidence suggests elements of consciousness may briefly exist beyond the measurable activity of the brain and that death, long considered absolute, is instead a negotiable condition.”
Ms Fowler’s analysis of dozens of previous studies found that up to 20% of heart attack survivors recall conscious experiences during periods when their brain was not showing electrical activity.
Recordings of activity in dying humans and animals have also shown surges in brainwaves above baseline waking levels, she said.
Death is traditionally defined as the irreversible loss of brain and circulatory function. But Ms Fowler said: “There have been studies that have shown that up to 90 minutes after the declaration of death those neural firings are still going off in the brain.”
In one study, researchers at Yale University restored some functions in the brains of decapitated pigs hours after death.
Another study of people whose hearts were stopped while their body was cooled during surgery — temporarily causing a controlled, clinical “death” — found a small number appeared to have had some awareness of what was happening.
That paper, published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery last year, found three out of 36 patients “recalled other memories including events around the procedure and themes consistent with a recalled experience of death”.
Other studies included in the review documented cases of awareness reported by people undergoing CPR.
Ms Fowler said the weight of evidence suggested biological and neurological functions “do not cease abruptly”.
Presenting the study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, she argued that death should be redefined as “a gradual, interruptible process”.
She also claimed the findings could have implications for decisions about how soon to harvest organs after death and for how long resuscitation efforts should continue.
In a report co-authored with two colleagues, Ms Fowler added: “Death, once believed to be a final and immediate boundary, reveals itself instead as a process, a shifting landscape where consciousness, biology and meaning persist longer than we once imagined.
“Consciousness may not vanish the moment the brain falls silent. Cells may not die the moment the heart stops.”
