Latest from Dr Sam Parnia

An article from Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health-news/w...ter-we-die

“Death has always been defined by when the heart stops beating, because what happens when the heart stops beating is that there’s no blood getting around the body, so almost immediately a person stops breathing and their brain shuts down and becomes non functional,” Dr. Sam Parnia, co-author of a recent study of life after death by a team at the NYU Langone School of Medicine, told Healthline. “This is clinically referred to as cardiac arrest.”

Parnia explains that when a person is resuscitated with CPR, the brain only gets about 15 percent of the blood that normally circulates to it.

“This isn’t enough to reactivate the brain, so the brain by in large remains flat and doesn’t function during CPR,” said Parnia. “As soon as the heart stops, you not only lose consciousness and your brain stem reflexes are all gone, but also the electricity that your brain creates slows down immediately, and within about 2 to 20 seconds it completely flatlines.”

Up until Parnia’s current research, it’s been thought that when a person flatlines, they must be unconscious because no brain waves are detected. However, he’s challenging this notion.

“We think of death as a finite time,” Parnia said. “But science has come to understand that after a person has died, the cells inside the body start to undergo a process of death themselves, which takes a number of hours after the person is dead.”