What happens when you die? Science is advancing at prodigious speed on the subject and suggests that “resurrections” can no longer be ruled out in the future.
Since the mid-1970s, many researchers have wondered about this moment when we pass from life to death. The latest research shows that the boundary between life and death is more “porous” than one might imagine. Those of Jimo Borjigin, who teaches neurology at the University of Michigan, are spectacular. In his latest work, his first observation is “that things are happening in the brain that have no sense.”
Jimo Bojigin first studied, at the start of his career, with several colleagues, the case of a young woman placed in a coma following a cardiac arrest, and whose neuronal reactions at the time of death had caused a lot of noise . Her brain reactivated three times after doctors disconnected the machines keeping her alive. For Jimo Bojigin, the young woman had experienced an extremely intense near-death experience (NDE). In contemporary research devoted to the gray areas surrounding death, this patient is referred to as Patient 0ne.
Parapsychologists have since identified elements specific to NDEs: the vision of a white light, the feeling of a sensation of fullness, a moral reassessment of one's life and the sensation that the soul is detaching itself from the body. These four effects are to this day the reactions most often described by those who have reportedly returned to life. However, as she explains in The Guardian, Jimo Borjigin does not believe in the possibility that consciousness can leave the body, although she agrees that “strange” and unexplained activity occurs in the brain at the time of death . Why are NDE stories so often the same, for example?
One thing is now certain for scientists: death is not a point or a passage, but a process. After death, after the heart stops completely, blood and oxygen stop circulating in the body, of course. And the cells begin to break down. But the electrical activity of the brain does not stop immediately, the organs still remain functional to a certain extent. Better: the heart can in certain cases be restarted and brain functions restored. In other words, “the process of death can be reversed,” summarizes The Guardian.
Since the 1970s, medicine and technology have made it possible to bring thousands of people back to life from the path of death. With mouth to mouth, cardiac massage, and the use of defibrillators. And this is probably just the beginning. In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman, stuck in a snowstorm, spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life, without brain damage.
What if in a few years, we could revive people who have been dead for several days? Scientist Lance Becker, a specialist in this research, does not hide his enthusiasm about the likely revolution to come. “There has never been a more exciting time in the field. We are discovering new drugs, new machines, and new data about the brain,” he told the Guardian.
