Are we really dreaming our lives?

Researcher Jim B. Tucker writes: “One possibility that I hope you are now open to is the prospect of life after death that our cases of past-life memories suggest. Each of the children seems to have a consciousness that existed before in another person. Though this may seem ludicrous from a materialist standpoint, the situation gets much more interesting when we take the findings from quantum physicists into account. If the physical universe grows out of consciousness, there is no reason to think that a person’s individual consciousness ends when the physical brain dies. It may continue after death and return in a future life.

“I no longer imagine that we go to another place when we die. Instead, we have another dream. The idea of some entity—a soul or a consciousness —moving from one world to another places too much emphasis on the physical worlds. Instead, the new experiences continue to be creations of the mind. If the shared dream model is correct, there need not be just one afterlife. Each individual starts another dream at the point of death, and the nature of the dream can vary from person to person.

“Near-death experiences (NDEs) are, as the name suggests, the events that people report having when they come very close to death before being revived. The specifics of these experiences can vary. Just as people’s nighttime dreams are affected by their previous experiences, I would expect afterlife events to be affected by experiences in life, and this seems to be the case. In particular, though there are common features of NDEs across cultures, there are also cultural differences.

Allan Kellehear, medical and public health sociologist at the University of Bradford in the UK: “reviewed reports of NDEs that had been published from a number of countries. Looking at the parts of NDEs that are common in the Western cases, he found that the major features seen across cultures were going to other worlds and encountering other beings. An out-of-body experience was present in the NDEs of most cultures, and the life review was present in several. With the model I’m presenting, differences would be expected when people experience their next consciousness-created reality, their next dream.

“Our cases [involving past life memories] involve young children who have not been close to death and in fact usually aren’t old enough to fully comprehend the concept of death, yet their reports can be quite similar to NDE reports—thus posing a problem for psychological explanations offered for NDEs. Both phenomena—near-death experiences and intermission reports from young children [of an afterlife experience before being reborn]—may in fact be glimpses of the afterlife, and they are both consistent with the model of conscious-created reality.

“With the past-life memories they report, the children in our cases seem to be returning to the world in which they lived a previous life. A better way of describing this is to say that regardless of whether the children have an intermission experience, they fall back into the same dream they were in before—meaning this world. They have to be a new character as they continue, since the previous person has died in the dream at that point. Imagine that you are sleeping at night; you are awakened in the middle of a dream—perhaps you are startled awake by something traumatic that happens in it—but then you fall back asleep quickly and continue on in the same dream. This is completely analogous to what happens in our cases.

“Dying young increases the likelihood that a child will later report memories of a previous life. With the model I’m proposing, this makes sense. Individuals whose dreams end prematurely—by being brief or through an abrupt ending—are more likely to return quickly to the same dream. This idea of returning to the same dream also explains another pattern. The previous person was from the same country as the child in over ninety percent of our cases, often having lived fairly close by. Cases involving ordinary deaths are more likely to be same-family cases. The families are more likely to be strangers when more exceptional deaths were involved, meaning when the previous person died an unnatural death, died younger, or died unexpectedly even when the death was from natural causes.

“Nonetheless, there is no evidence that most children have such memories and thus no evidence, even if you accept our cases, that everyone is reborn back into this world. I see no reason to think that other mind-created worlds, other shared dreams, wouldn’t exist in addition to the world we know here. Just as we don’t usually return to the same dream when we sleep at night, the same pattern may well be true for our lives. Though individuals occasionally return to this shared dream, it might be more common to begin participating in a different shared dream after we die.

“Likewise, your life experiences could affect the mind-created worlds that follow after you die. Many Christians say your actions or beliefs determine whether you go to Heaven of Hell. But if I am right about existence being like a shared dream, then there might not be just one Heaven or just one Hell. There might be an infinite number of shared dreams, some heavenly, some hellish, and some like this world—heavenly at times, hellish at times, and most of the time somewhere in between. I do find it notable, however, that in this model I’m suggesting, the religions are right that the decisions and actions you make in this life help determine the kind of existence you have next. Though this would not involve a Judgment Day of any kind, you could experience a ‘good’ afterlife or a ‘bad’ one based on your life now, in what would be a purely naturalistic process.

“I don’t think there is our world and then the real spiritual world. Our world is as real as it gets. It is created by Mind, but that is also true for all other worlds. Existence grows out of consciousness. The world is indeed like a mind-simulated virtual reality, in a way, but it’s as real as reality gets. Along with my character in the short-lived dream, I as a dreamer also have my real self that exists apart from the dream. Likewise, I think we each have a larger part of us that transcends the individual dream—the individual lifetime—and continues to take part in creating other dreams, other lifetimes or worlds.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

Our consciousness makes possibilities real

“Despite appearances,” reincarnation researcher Jim B. Tucker argues, “the universe was not created in one fell swoop in the Big Bang. Instead, it continues to be created, one observation at a time. Events in the distant past such as the paths of photons billions of years ago—even events all the way back to the Big Bang—remain in suspended animation until they are observed, at which point one particular outcome occurs. This does not mean that we human observers had to come into existence. Different life forms might have evolved here or in other places in the universe. Observers had to develop somewhere, however, in order for the world to exist.

Wheeler’s theory of genesis through observer participants is known as “the strong anthropic principle. A universe that supports the development of observers is the only kind that ever could come into existence. It might seem that humans on this little planet, or observers anywhere in any galaxy, are far too small and unimportant to have any significant function in the universe, much less bring it into existence. Observation, however, couldn’t create a smaller universe, not because of size per se but because of the time required to produce life. As Wheeler pointed out, to produce heavy elements like carbon out of hydrogen, thermonuclear combustion is required, and it needs several billion years to cook inside a star. And for the universe to provide several billion years of time, general relativity says it must extend in space several billion light-years. Any observed universe would have to be as big as ours is, in order to have observers.

Stanford physicist Andrei Linde writes: ‘I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.’ And this leads him to assert: ‘I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness.’ “French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat argues: ‘The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.’

“Conscious observers eventually evolved in the universe . . . and then created that very same universe. How does that make sense? One answer is that individual observers are the result of evolution, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that consciousness itself is. For people like me who are open to the possibility that consciousness is more than just the result of physical chemistry and electrochemical potentials—that there might be more to existence than just the physical universe—the way out of the paradox is for consciousness to be primary. The physical world grows out of it.

“The findings of quantum physics have challenged the worldview of materialism from the outset; at the very least, they have undeniably shown that the world does not function at the smallest level in a way that common sense suggests it does. The findings point, not just for me but for a number of physicists as well, to the fundamental importance of consciousness. Something has to be outside the quantum system to register it, to observe it. My answer is that consciousness is outside the quantum system, interacting with the physical universe but also existing beyond it, as it registers and creates that universe. Consciousness does not exist because the physical world does; the physical world exists because consciousness does. As Max Plank said, we cannot get behind consciousness.

“The picture that emerges from quantum physics is a world in which events do not occur until conscious beings observe them. One way to comprehend this is to realize that it is quite similar to another world we know very well—the world of our dreams. When we are dreaming, people only come into existence there when we interact with them. There are differences, to be sure. All sorts of nonsensical things happen in the dream world. It is undeniable that the possibilities are more limited in the physical world. Events that begin through observation become fixed, unable to be altered by other observations. The overall process, however, is very similar. Possibilities exist, and one of them becomes a fact when it is observed.

“The analogy to dreams is so apt that the world can be thought of, not as the giant clockworks of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe, but as a dream that all its observers share. Its pieces only come into existence when one of its dreamers experiences them. When something is not being observed, it may as well not exist.

“We are the physical beings living in a physical world that mainstream science tells us we are. But we also have consciousness that is more than just a product of our brains. Though we have physical bodies with limited life spans, we also have a conscious piece that is part of something bigger. Consciousness is independent of the physical world and is even the creator of the physical world. And a portion of it is in each of us.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 165-193.

Our "knowing" is verified by quantum mechanics

Researcher Jim B. Tucker writes: “Work in quantum mechanics has revealed what is known as the measurement problem. This unassuming name describes a challenge that shakes our understanding of the world to its core. Quantum theory says that particles on the small quantum scale exist less as solid objects and more as probability waves. Only when an object is measured, it seems, does its probability wave collapse to produce one outcome.”

In what is called the double-slit experiment, “you have a light source, along with a photographic plate that records the light that’s emitted. Between them, you place a screen that blocks the light. If you cut a slit in the screen for the light to pass through, then a fuzzy image is created on the photographic plate that corresponds to the location of the slit.

“What happens if you cut a second slit in the screen? You might think you would get two fuzzy images, matching the two slits, but you don’t. Instead, the light appears to pass through the slits as waves, producing an interference pattern on the photographic plate, of alternating light and dark bands. Light sometimes acts as if it’s made up of particles, and other times it acts like waves. But here’s the thing about the double-slit experiment: when you turn down the light source so low that the light goes through the screen one photon at a time, guess what happens? Somehow, you still get the interference pattern. As theoretical physicist Paul Dirac said, ‘Each photon then interferes only with itself.’ It’s as if each photon hasn’t made up its mind about which slit to choose and goes through both of them simultaneously.

“In case you think these results are simply due to the strangeness of light, its particle-wave duality, you should know that the double-slit experiment has now been done with electrons as well. In fact, similar experiments have been done with neutrons, atoms, and even larger molecules. Not just light but actual matter also acts like waves, seeming to go in two places at once and interfering with itself. The famed physicist Richard Feynman said the double-slit experiment was ‘impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way’ and it ‘has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.’

“Most of us learned in science class that atoms, the building blocks of the universe, consist of electrons circling a nucleus like small billiard balls. Quantum physicists tell us instead that electrons are better seen as smears of probability, with their locations being potentials rather than definite places. As strange as it may seem, it is only when an electron is measured that its location goes from a smear to a specific spot.

“In the double-slit experiment, there is one thing that can force the photons to make up their minds and go through one slit or the other. If you set up sensors to observe them as they travel, each photon is seen going through just one of the slits. The interference pattern on the photographic plate disappears, and you get two fuzzy images corresponding to the two slits instead. The observation leads to one path, one definite outcome, rather than the two potential outcomes that existed before.

“Similarly, take a small particle that can travel down one of the two paths, with a fifty-fifty chance of going down each one. According to quantum theory, until someone looks to see which path it goes down, with a measuring device for instance, all that can be said about the particle is that it has the two probabilities. Common sense says it goes down a path but we just don’t know which one until someone checks. Common sense, however, can be misleading at the quantum level. Until the particle is observed, it does not actually go down either path. It simply exists as a fifty-fifty probability wave for going down each path.

“To say that light and matter only exist as probability waves until they are observed raises the question of what their existence in such a state would mean. As Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, noted: ‘The atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real [as any phenomena in daily life]; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.’ With a measurement, one outcome snaps into place. ‘The transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation,’ to quote Heisenberg again. The measurement somehow causes one of the two possibilities—or in other situations one of many possibilities—to become the reality that is seen. Measuring something thus creates a reality that did not exist before.

“Imagine that you do an experiment in which a photon can take one of two paths, and a measuring device can be set up on one of the paths to determine if the photon goes down it. The device failing to detect it on that path would mean that the photon must have taken the other one.” Quantum physicists examining this situation “found that observing the absence of a photon on the first path collapses the wave function just as much as observing the presence of it would. Since nothing is actually measured and only an absence is observed, this indicates that the observation—not the measurement itself—is the critical process in wave function collapse.’”

Moreover, Tucker writes: “it’s not the observing per se that produces a result, it is the knowing produced by the observing that does. By seeing that a particle doesn’t go down one path, an observer can deduce that it must have gone down the other one. Since no other result is possible, the observer ‘knows’ which path the particle took, thereby collapsing the wave function and producing the result.” As John Hopkins physicist Richard Conn Henry wrote in the journal Nature, ‘The wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing.’ This led him to conclude, ‘The Universe is entirely mental.’

Another physicist, Helmut Schmidt, conducted experiments “to see if conscious effort could produce nonrandom results even if the effort occurred after the events had already been recorded. He got positive results in the five studies he did, with odds against chance of 8,000 to 1. He recorded random events such as red and green light flashes, and the series of flashes was then stored on a floppy disk. Days or months later, the sequence was shown on a computer while a test subject tried to mentally cause one of the colors to flash more. As long as no one inspected the recordings beforehand, the mental efforts of the test subjects could cause the results to be nonrandom, with more of one color appearing that would be expected by chance. The test subjects’ success means that the collapse of the wave function did not occur when the recording device initially measured the flashes of light; the collapse only happened when the recordings were later observed.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

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"Consciousness actually creates the universe"

Physician Jim B. Tucker asks: “After studying the cases I have and reviewing the notes of Ian Stevenson’s investigations, I have concluded that some young children do appear to possess memories and emotions that come from a deceased individual. How does a reasonable person make sense of this? Something extraordinary seems to be going on, but how can an idea like past lives mesh with the world of science and all that we have learned from the scientific method?

 “The answer,” Tucker suggests, “lies in being aware that science involves more than just scientific materialism, the concept that the world consists entirely of physical matter. On the basis of materialism, most mainstream scientists would dismiss the cases out of hand because they say that no part of us can continue after our bodies die. As I’ve learned more about scientific knowledge as it exists today, however, I have discovered that the picture is actually much more complex.

“Findings in physics over the last hundred years—particularly in quantum physics or quantum mechanics, the study of the universe’s smallest particles—have shown that the physical universe is much more complicated than it appears. These findings strengthen my view that there is a consciousness that exists separate from the material world. I now believe that the physical grows out of the mental, meaning that the physical world is created out of something you can think of as Mind or consciousness or the spiritual. Our cases, and the possibility of children remembering past lives, then fit in nicely with a new understanding of existence.

“Materialism—the belief that physical matter is all there is—has become practically synonymous with modern science, and it is unquestioned by many, though certainly not all, scientists. It relegates religion to antiquated folk belief and consciousness to purely a product of a physical brain.” Nonetheless, “A recent study found that a quarter of scientists from top research universities regarded themselves as spiritual, which many viewed as separate from religious. Even twenty percent of the atheist scientists considered themselves ‘spiritual atheists.’

“What most mainstream scientists seem unaware of, or at most only vaguely aware of, is that the most fundamental findings of physics have now disproved materialism. Valuing a special place for consciousness or spirituality can be incorporated into an overall understanding that includes the insights gained through science. Work in quantum mechanics has undermined many of the basics of what we thought we knew.

What is described as our “Big History"[1] affirms the materialist story: “The universe gives the appearance that it sprang into existence approximately 13.8 billion years ago. According to the Big Bang theory, all matter and energy present in the universe today began then as a single point. It expanded with the Big Bang to create the still expanding universe of today. After 300,000 years or so, hydrogen and helium molecules began to form. Another 300,000 years later, clumps of matter formed and began coalescing into galaxies. Our sun was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and the planets followed after that.

“By appearances, eukaryotic cell organism developed one and a half to two billion years ago, followed by multicellular life. More complex organisms developed, leading eventually to the variety of plants and animals present today. Humans were the accidental result of natural selection. As their brains evolved, their frontal lobes grew and produced the experience of consciousness. As conscious observers, humans were eventually able to examine the world and learn how it came into existence.

“I believe,” Tucker writes, that “this story is seriously incomplete. Consciousness is not merely an incidental byproduct of evolution. The logical conclusion from various findings in physics is that consciousness actually creates the universe. And its creative process continues to occur in every instant. As Max Planck, a founder of quantum theory, said, ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.’”[2]

 

[1] See Big History Project, https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home. The web site states: “Big History examines our past, explains our present, and imagines our future. It’s a story about us. An idea that arose from a desire to go beyond specialized and self-contained fields of study to grasp history as a whole. This growing, multi-disciplinary approach is focused on high school students, yet designed for any seeking answers to the big questions about the history of our Universe.” Unfortunately, these answers assume a materialistic view of science and the cosmos, as I’ve explained in an essay entitled “Evolving Consciousness” at www.doingfaith.com/consciousness/evolving-consciousness.html.

 

[2] For my explanation, written before I read Tucker’s book, see “Consciousness is Fundamental” at www.doingfaith.com/consciousness/fundamental.html.

 

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

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Tucker's study of the "third James"

When James Leininger was two years old he “began having terrible nightmares about a plane crash. By the time he was three, he had told his parent that before he was born, he was a pilot who flew from a boat. His plane was shot in the engine by the Japanese and crashed in the water.”

Two years later ABC interviewed James and his parents, who said on the air that they had confirmed much of what their son had told them. “He said he had been a pilot named James on the boat Natoma, he had been shot down and killed at Iwo Jima, and he had a friend named Jack Larsen. His father had discovered that a James Huston from the USS Natoma Bay had been shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Another pilot on the Natoma Bay was named Jack Larsen.”

“Soon after his third birthday, James began drawing pictures. He drew battle scenes with ships and planes over and over again—his parents report he drew hundreds of them. James began signing the pictures, James 3. When his parents asked him about it, he said, ‘I’m the third James. I’m James 3.’ What it may refer to is that James Huston was a junior. That would make James Leininger the third James.

“When James turned three, he got his first G.I. Joe and named it Billy (or Billie, as it turned out). When he received his second one that Christmas, he named it Leon. Two Christmases later, when he was five and a half, he received his third, which he named Walter. These G.I. Joes were his buddies, and he took them everywhere. He played with them in the tub and slept with them at night. When his parents asked about the names Leon and Walter, he told them that was who met him when he got to heaven.

“Ten men from Huston’s squadron aboard Natoma Bay were killed before he was. The names of three of them were Billie, Leon, and Walter. The day after James’s comment about meeting them, his mother brought up the topic again and asked James if there was really a heaven. When he said yes, she asked where it was, and he spread out his arms and said, ‘It’s right here.’ She asked what it looked like, and he said it was the most beautiful place in the world.

“She asked him if there is really a God, and James said yes. She then asked if God is a man or a woman. James’s answer was that God is not a man or a woman; he is whoever you need him to be at the time. When his mother asked him if everyone comes back, James said no, that you get to choose. You don’t have to come back. You can, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” James also told his parents that he had picked them to be his family, after he found them in Hawaii eating dinner on the beach. His parents had been in Hawaii about a year before James was born, and on their last night there they had dinner on the beach.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

Patrick remembers his prior life as Kevin

Jim B. Tucker is Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies. Tucker has spent more than a decade continuing the research of Ian Stevenson into past lives. In his previous book Life Before Life, Tucker provides an overview of fifty years of research, mostly supervised by Stevenson. Return to Life focuses on a few cases, and explains why quantum mechanics supports the conclusion that consciousness is not simply the product of brain activity. This new way of understanding consciousness also offers a possible explanation of the past life memories that Tucker and Stevenson have documented.

Tucker’s explanation of both the theory and experimental evidence that support quantum mechanics is remarkably clear, and his use of dreams as a useful analogy for living other lives is unique and evocative. Tucker’s book is not directly about NDEs, but explores one form of extraordinary knowing. Return to Life considers comments from children about their experiences in the “afterlife” of a previous life before they were reborn—which Tucker refers to an as an “intermission experience.”

Tucker begins his book with a quote from Voltaire: “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

Patrick told his mother, Lisa, that he had a prior life as Kevin, her first child who had died due to a metastatic neuroblastoma when he was about two years old. Patrick was born twenty years later. After Patrick’s birth, Lisa: “soon noticed a white opacity covering Patrick’s left eye. The doctors diagnosed it as a corneal leukoma. Patrick was seen by an ophthalmologist and examined periodically. The opacity shrunk after several weeks but did not completely disappear. While his vision was hard to assess with any precision when he was very young, Patrick was essentially blind in his left eye—just as Kevin had been blind in that eye at the end of his life.

“Lisa also felt a lump on Patrick’s head above his right ear at the same location where Kevin’s tumor had been biopsied. When we [Tucker and Ian Stevenson] examined Patrick [at age five], we felt the nodule above his ear. It had migrated slightly behind his ear by the time he was five, but Lisa said it was directly above the ear when he was born. It was hard, elevated, and more or less round. But it was not tender at all.

“Patrick was also born with an unusual mark on his neck. A dark slanted line that was about four millimeters long when we met him; it looked like a small cut. It was on the front of his neck on the right side. This was the area where Kevin’s central surgical line had been inserted.

“When Patrick was four years old, he began talking about Kevin’s life. Lisa was getting ready for work one day when Patrick asked if she remembered when he had surgery. After she told him he had never had surgery, he said, ‘Sure I did, right here on my ear’ and pointed to the spot above his right ear where Kevin’s tumor was biopsied.

“Another time, Patrick became excited when he saw a picture of Kevin. He had never seen it before because Lisa didn’t keep pictures of Kevin up in the house. His hands shaking, Patrick said, ‘Here is my picture. I’ve been looking for that.’ He was definite as he said, ‘That’s me.’ He also talked once about the small, brown puppy that stayed with the family. Lisa and Kevin had indeed kept a dog like that, one belonging to Lisa’s mother when she moved into an apartment complex that didn’t allow pets.

“One of the most inexplicable features of the case was that Patrick limped once he got old enough to walk. He had an unusual gait in which he would swing out his left leg. This matched the way Kevin had walked, since he had to wear a brace after breaking his leg. We asked Patrick to walk across the room several times and he was still limping slightly at age five, even though he seemed to have no medical reason to do so.

“Two years later, we visited Patrick and Lisa again. Patrick had continued to say unusual things. He had talked about a life prior to the one as Kevin, this one in Hawaii. He talked about his family there and a son who died. He mentioned a statute that melted due to a volcano and how the townspeople rebuilt it. From his descriptions, his parents believed he was recalling events from the 1940s.

“Several months before we met this second time, Patrick began talking one night as his mother fixed dinner. He asked, ‘Do you know that you have a relative that no one talks about?’ He said he had met this relative in heaven before being born. He was tall and thin with brown hair and brown eyes. The relative told Patrick that his name was Billy and he was called ‘Billy the Pirate.’ He had been killed by his stepfather, shot point-blank up in the mountains. Patrick said Billy was upset that no one talked about him after his death.

“Lisa knew nothing about any relative named Billy. When she called to ask her mother, she discovered that her mother’s oldest sister had a son named Billy. The details Patrick gave were correct. His stepfather killed Billy three years before Lisa was born. The murder was never talked about in the family. When Lisa asked about the nickname ‘Billy the Pirate,’ her mother laughed. His wildness had led to the nickname, and Lisa’s mother hadn’t heard it since Billy’s death. There seemed to be no way Patrick could have ever heard about Billy or his nickname before.

The considerable number of cases involving coincidences and memories of a previous life are not proof of reincarnation, but verify that the human experience is not uncommon. More of the cases occur in India and other countries where Hindu and Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation are deeply embedded in the culture, but there are also examples in the West.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 63-87.

Consciousness remains a mystery

Dr. Sam Parnia writes: “For millennia, defining death was easy and straightforward. Nobody needed to worry about what was life and what was death. It was quite clear and obvious: when a person’s heart stopped, he or she was dead. It was known that people would die for two main reasons—either their hearts stopped or they stopped breathing. Whichever stopped first (the heart or the lungs) would cause the other organ to also stop quickly, and then the brain would also stop working almost immediately afterward; therefore, we could say someone was dead.

“Scientists were not aware of a period of time after death in which the organs and cells in the body remained viable and had not yet become irreparably damaged, and hence death could be reversed. We were also not aware of the fairly long time that existed between these two states. The other way that death could happen was if someone has severe trauma to the brain; in that case, the brain would swell up and then start to press on the brain stem, which is where the reflexes are located that regulate the heartbeat and breathing. If the brain stem is compressed, all the nerves there stop working and the person immediately stops breathing and the heart immediately stops beating.

“But now the advances in medicine indicated that for the first time in history, death had to be defined in some other completely different way. This would enable the definition of death to also include the point in time where there is irreversible brain damage irrespective of whether the heart is still beating—brain death—to accommodate the growing number of people who could now be kept alive artificially (by maintaining their heartbeats and breathing) even after they had developed permanent brain death.

“Anything that impacts the ability of brain cells to be active will cause the brain to stop functioning. This includes when someone’s blood sugar has dropped to very low levels, or if the temperature in the body is very low. Certain drugs, particularly those given for sedation and anesthesia, will also stop brain activity if given in high enough doses.

“There are case reports of people who had appeared to be brain dead (and had met all the brain death testing criteria) after being examined many hours and days after being warmed up to a normal temperature following hypothermia treatment for cardiac arrest. Only to show signs of brain recovery up to seven days later.

Consciousness, Parnia asserts, remains a mystery. “It is not like understanding the science of cell functions, or for that matter any other entity we have studied in the physical sciences in the past. Though it is a pure mystery, we know it exists and defines who we are. Nonetheless, nobody has been able to explain how human consciousness comes to be.

“As a consequence of the progress in resuscitation science that started in earnest almost half a century ago and has been evolving since, over the past forty years there has been growing recognition that people who have had a close brush with death or have gone beyond the threshold of death and entered the gray zone that exists between death and permanent irreversible brain damage have provided consistent mental recollections that correspond with that period. 

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 264-284.