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Sam near-death experiences have been used by some people to assert the existence of Immortal Souls certainly life beyond death and it's very controversial you're a physician you
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work with acutely ill patients some of whom undergo cardiac arrest and you study what happens during that period give me
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a sense of of what you do and how during that period of cardiac arrest where the body and the Brain shut down what we might be able to learn scientifically about the the the state
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of human consciousness well I'm willing to make a bet that you have a very specific concept of death and my bet is that you believe and this
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is the way we've all been conditioned that's why I think you may be different but I suspect not um certainly most people out there if you were to ask them including Physicians will think this way but essentially death is a black and white
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moment okay you're either dead or you're alive I mean it can't be both right and if you look at Society this is permeated if you watch films if you watch uh shows Etc you know the guy gets shot he's alive
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and then he's dead and when he's dead that's it that's the end and our definitions and concepts of death are really that it's an irreversible term in organic and you see this doctors write death
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notes they give a specific time 9 42. Mr so-and-so died at 9 42 precisely and that's the legal record why is that that's because for thousands of years
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um essentially when the heart stopped a person becomes motionless lifeless and they are irreversibly dead nothing could be done for them so the heart stops person stops breathing immediately because no blood is Flowing there's no
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Oxygen delivered to the body the brain shuts down within seconds and it flatlines completely and you can declare them dead and that's how we do it still in hospitals today all over the world however what's important to realize and
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this is the the big discovery of the 21st century is that actually just because someone's died and I've given them a Death Note as a physician as an intensive care physician the cells inside the body
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have not yet died why would they and in fact cells can be remain viable they don't function after you die they're completely shut down but they are in this sort of hibernating viable state for many hours after death
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and we used to think that brain cells neurons only had like five or ten minutes before they became irreversibly damaged and we now realize that's not true brain cells actually have hours of time after a blood flow has stopped to them before they become irreversibly
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damaged and die so there was a very famous study from about 10 years ago where a group of scientists in California published in nature took uh people who win the corpses that have been sent to a mortuary and they took
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core brain biopsies and they many hours 7 10 15 hours after death and they took these cells and they took them to laboratory and they managed to show that you can actually grow neuronal stem cells from corpses okay we
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just proves that point so now take it to the concept of death we consider death to be irreversible and clearly if you leave a corpse long enough then the damage the cells will be so extensive now no matter what we do
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today or tomorrow we can't revive them however today we've managed to discover ways to essentially manipulate those processes by which cells are dying in a person who's just died and restart the heart thus bring the
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person back to life not just minutes but hours after they've died every day you hear of records of people who've essentially gone for four five six hours and then been revived and the future I
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think will extend further so now you have this fascinating situation where you have this gray Zone where people have died there's no no doubt about that um yet they're brought back so two things come out of this one as a
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physician my role my interest in this area is to ensure that we can learn how to manipulate those processes and bring back a whole person to society rather than cases like Terry shover where people end up with brain damage
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however the flip side of this we cannot deny that human beings are conscious thinking entities and that essentially we don't want to bring back a a husk a shell we want to bring back a
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whole person with full Consciousness the mind the psyche the soul of the person with them and so we study Consciousness after the period of death after someone's gone through cardiac arrest
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and what we're beginning to demonstrate is that actually contrary to our perceptions Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died and in fact Consciousness
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appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death beyond that of course we can't study because that's the extreme that's the extent that we can get to I don't know what will happen in the future but
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certainly during the time when the brain is shut down and flatlined the entity of Consciousness does not get lost now why is that because if you think about again we have these very emotional Concepts about death death is a biological process and when you stop blood flow to
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brain cells they undergo certain changes and will eventually become damaged however the first thing that happens is that you stop oxygen delivery to the areas inside the core of the brain that
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modulate your sense of being awake and alert okay the reticulate activating system various other parts and so it's very similar to the effect of say giving a general anesthetics to somebody if you give a high enough dose of general
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anesthetic to a patient or person then you basically shut down those areas of the brain and the person's Consciousness looks like it's lost flips out of sight okay but we wouldn't say that person's
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Consciousness has become annihilated forever we just realize it's gone temporarily and so when people first die what's happening is that oxygen is stopping to those parts of the brain and it's essentially taking Consciousness
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out of you and making it disappear but it doesn't necessarily disappear Forever at that time so we actually have made a lot of advances because if you think about it in society until now the idea about death is very much
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embedded in personal views philosophical views theological views and for the first time in history we're able to take the objectivity of Science and study what happens and at the very least we can say that the idea that some people
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have that oh the moment I die that's it I'm gone doesn't seem to be correct your Consciousness does not disappear even though it looks to be out of sight in that early phase but the Consciousness is contemporal with the um the viability
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of neuronal cells you said that and so during this period whether it's for a half hour or several hours as you now can do which is marvelous the potential Consciousness is is
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contemporous with neurons still being able to be activated so it's hard to say that the brain is totally flatlined in yet Consciousness still seems to exist it doesn't seem like you can you can
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clearly tease apart one from the other if indeed the consciousness this does reflect some kind of reality well of course as you know and this has been the big debating Point not just for
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you and I today but people well before us who've now passed away great philosophy permanently that's right and I'm sure this conversation will go on with our children and various others but we don't know the relationship between
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Consciousness and the brain and if you divide up the world just for gross oversimplification you have two camps where the scientists or non-scientists certain scientists believe no matter what that Consciousness is produced from brain
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cell activity even though we have no evidence or understanding of how brain cells could possibly generate a thought we understand how brain cells work we have these amazing microscopes that can look at the minute structures inside the
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cells we can see how they produce proteins and chemicals there's no room for thought there's no room for Consciousness within them and if you were to put a brain cell down a microscope and I were to say to you you know this brain cell fascinating it's
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thinking I'm hungry right now or if I were to throw a brick at my neighbor's window and this my brain cell is now feeling guilty about that you say it's crazy brain cells don't think so why would it be that somehow if you connect 10 or 100 or a thousand or a million or
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a billion of these cells together through electricity and chemical signals they would somehow produce the amazing phenomena of thought and Consciousness so that's the big dilemma there are some people who say well I don't know how but
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it must be in there and then there are a Nobel Prize winners like Francis Crick the co-discoverer of DNA fall into that category then you have the other group of scientists some very eminent scientists who actually say you know what maybe we have to put our hands up
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and accept that the brain cells are not that different to other cells in the body and they cannot generate they don't have the Machinery to generate thoughts and consciousness of course Consciousness interacts with the brain but maybe it's a separate
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scientific entity that hasn't been discovered what could that possibly be if Consciousness is not directly related to the brain in some identity Theory not produced by the brain you mean okay the
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same is that what you mean yeah identity in other words that Consciousness is produced by the brain and is the brains are two separate Concepts right produced by the brain is one thing it's an emergent property but to say
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Consciousness is some sequence of neural impulses or something I mean it's a real identity it's uh it was a produced that may be produced because it needs some other things but the the hardcore materialists basically have to say that
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the Consciousness is something in the brain absolutely as an identity and so if that if that is not the case if Consciousness is something other than that and you say it's a scientifically discern could be a scientifically
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discerned Factor what could it conceivably be well think about it thoughts exist all the time and we have thoughts all the time and I don't think anyone could really deny that we have we're thinking
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conscious beings so they must have some sort of nature some sort of materiality some sort of physics whatever you want to call it but clearly it is of a very subtle nature such that we can't perceive it with our five senses like most things around the
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universe frankly that we cannot perceive right now we cannot perceive electromagnetic waves yet we know that they're here they're everywhere and electromagnetic waves have been here that were here 500 years ago a thousand
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years ago million years ago before we discovered them as human beings so it's the same thing with human consciousness we haven't yet discovered it I think it I tend to lean towards the idea that it exists it's a very subtle
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type of nature materiality that we haven't yet discovered but it isn't magical it's not non-scientific and don't forget throughout history whenever things were not discovered through science people used to call the magic you know what I mean but I think it
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exists the key thing though here is does Consciousness die with the brain or does it continue many scientists such as myself were originally sort of you know we were
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brought up to believe that Consciousness in the brain are basically the same thing and I'm no different however when you examine the results of studies in people who've gone through clinical death through cardiac arrest for these ever extended periods of time we see
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that there are clear cases where people have had conscious Consciousness has continued but the brain has flatlined and therefore that puts a doubt on that hypothesis and it suggests we we could
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have been wrong maybe Consciousness is a separate entity to the brain but it uses a brain like electromagnetic waves need a TV set to to show their sound and picture
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