Well the long awaited study done by Dr. Sam Parnia and his colleagues has finally been published. Skeptics are already over all of course. One of the skeptic websites, neurologica blog, runned by Dr. Steven Novella claims that no evidence for an afterlife was found in the study. He is wrong as one case of a man was verified by using a physical marker (audio stimuli, he was able to hear the beeps, the beeping machine made three beeps in three minute intervals. This patient's near death experience happened exactly when the patient was unconsciousness, with no brain activity and no heart beat. This case shows clearly that near death experiences are not hallucinations. Most of the patients were interviewed more than once.
The study concludes numerous points:
• The themes relating to the experience of death appear far broader than what has been understood so far, or what has been described as so called near-death experiences.
• In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events.
• A higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.
• Widely used yet scientifically imprecise terms such as near-death and out-of-body experiences may not be sufficient to describe the actual experience of death. Future studies should focus on cardiac arrest, which is biologically synonymous with death, rather than ill-defined medical states sometimes referred to as ‘near-death’.
• The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice.
You can find the full details of the study in the journal of resuscitation
http://www.resuscitationjournal.com/article/S0300-9572%2814%2900739-4/fulltext
