As such, theoretically, a person may hear the announcement of their own death by doctors, reports the Independent.
The claim was made by Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine in the eponymous city, ISNA reported.
The doctor and his team had been examining people who suffered cardiac arrest, technically died, but were later revived.
It’s the largest study of its kind ever carried out.
Some of the people who were studied claimed that they had complete awareness of what was going on around them, including conversations that were taking place, even after the declaration of their death.
Their claims were verified by the medical and the nursing staff who were present at that time.
Death is defined as the point at which the heart no longer beats, and blood flow to the brain is cut off.
Dr. Sam Parnia said: “Technically, that’s how you get the time of death – it’s all based on the moment when the heart stops.
“Once that happens, blood no longer circulates to the brain, which means brain function halts almost instantaneously.
“You lose all your brain stem reflexes – your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone.”
However, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a burst of brain energy as someone dies.
In 2013, researchers at the University of Michigan looked at the electrical signals inside the brains of nine anaesthetised rats after having induced a heart attack.
They saw activity patterns which are linked to a “hyper-alert state” in the brief period after clinical death.
Dr. Parnia said: “In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of ‘love’, for instance, we’re trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we’re all going to have when we die.”