They discover that the mind keeps working when the heart stops

A vast research conducted by American scientists suggests that human consciousness does not go off immediately after the heart stops.

According to Sam Parnia, director of intensive care and resuscitation research at the NYU Langone School of Medicine in New York, in the vast majority of cases doctors medically define death from the moment the heart stop beating "Technically speaking, this is how the moment of death is established: everything is based on the moment when the heart stops," he explained.

Once that happens, the blood stops flowing to the brain, which means that brain function stops "almost instantaneously" and all the reflexes ruled by its stem are lost.

The cerebral cortex - the so-called "thinking part" - also slows down and brain waves are no longer visible on an electrical monitor. This initiates a chain reaction of cellular processes that eventually result in the death of the set of brain cells, but that can take hours after the heart has stopped, says the researcher.

Sam Parnia points out that in the first phase of death, the person can still experience some form of consciousness. Evidence of this would be the cases in which, after the heart has stopped and soon returns to work, patients are able to describe accurately what was happening around them at that time: the doctors and nurses working, the words who exchanged between them, etc. These are stories that were later confirmed by the medical personnel present at the site, who were surprised to hear that their patients, who were technically dead, could remember all those details.

Parnia, nevertheless, considered necessary a precision and commented for it the famous American film "Deadly Line", where it is shown that death and subsequent resuscitation could improve normal brain activity. The scientist indicated that in real life it is not like that.

"What tends to happen is that people who have had such profound experiences can return positively transformed: they become more altruistic and more committed to helping others. They find a new meaning in life after having had an encounter with death, "he said. "However, there's nothing like a sudden magical improvement in his memories, that's just an exaggeration of Hollywood."