The video documentary linked below is  basically a medical and scientific look at how the brain might still function after a person suffers a full cardiac arrest, learned by studying survivors of resuscitation.

It does detail some “near-death experiences” in some of these cases, in a non-religious way, and it starts with a doctor describing his own experience after a cardiac arrest.  That doctor is Robert Montgomery, MD PhD, chair of surgery and director of transplant at NYU, elected last year to the prestigious National Academy of Medicine for his renal transplant work.

Not that doctors are any better at describing these personal phenomena, but they tend to use the framework and vocabulary of their training in their descriptions.  The film, out last year but now on YouTube, seems to be organized out of the Parnia Lab at NYU, headed by Sam Parnia MD PhD, a critical care specialist researching brain function and consciousness.

 

 

Many of the speakers are researchers in the physiology of the brain after oxygen deprivation, or  emergency physician academicians interested in resuscitation and preserving neurological function. They also have neurologists, a philosopher and a cognitive scientist.

They describe the US medical distinction of “cardiac death” vs the “brain death” concept, which began after the advent of life support machines.  It mentions cooling and other methods that might help the brain while a person has poor heart function in resuscitation.

They even cite a bit of a macabre Nature paper from Yale (2019), [paywall] in which investigators took slaughterhouse animals’ brains and set them up on a custom extracorporeal membrane oxygenator (ECMO)-like system and restored some metabolic functions…but they could not detect organized electrical activity (EEG-like) that would suggest consciousness.

There were ethical considerations. No one mentioned Frankenstein, but the science of resilient surviving brain stem cells from cadavers, etc. still seems early.

The human narratives of near-death experiences are striking, with survivors describing it in their own ways (all English speakers);  if this could be considered some proof of the concept, the idea that the brain might be active for much longer than expected after cardiac death is stunning.

Someone does make a distinction between these experiences, with their commonly described “hyperacute” and lucid moments, contrasting them to other neurologic conditions, such a confused delirium. Back to Alzheimer’s, presumably with neuronal death and subsequent atrophy, the NYU folks are part of the group looking at “paradoxical lucidity” in severe dementia, which might somehow be related, something this blogger had written about:

AD Paradoxical Lucidity as a goal: Ritalin, caffeine, SAGE-718?

along with the physiology of consciousness, as interpreted by imaging in coma:

https://alzheimergadfly.net/2022/03/08/consciousness-and-brain-imaging-seeing-what-youre-thinking/

Finally, also related:

https://www.pangyrus.com/poetry/heres-how-it-will-go/

Here’s How It Will Go 

Ron Louie

 

The chest cage and diaphragm, with expansive spirit, 

cooperate one last time, 

the discomfort at the depth of the intake 

a reason to pause, with a sense of fullness 

if not quite fulfillment; 

there may be a last perception of aroma

attending the secretive swirling 

within those dark cavernous hollows, 

and maybe I will still hear 

my own last letting go 

my sigh in accepting that pain or fear or relief, 

that last passive expulsion of vital and toxic gases, 

from the elaborate labyrinth on which I’ve so long depended, 

without seeing it, or knowing its real intricacy, hardly even aware of it, 

throughout all the hoarse wet wheezing, 

and the dry coarse coughing, and 

whatever eloquence and beneficence I could muster, 

to balance the ugly exclamations to which I duly confess, 

the controlled expressions of my limited emotional range, 

or the uncontrolled expressions of my limited emotional range, 

as if those vocalizations, the manipulations of airy elements, 

were some essence of me, and who I was for those moments, 

defining some idea of me; of course, yes, I would have that thought, 

even as the oxygen, lasting through that final breath,

is conclusively released from its captured exploitation, 

allowing that thought, perhaps, to somehow seem to cease.