Law of Attraction Magazine August, 2015 Issue | Page 54

Resul t s of Worl d's Largest Near Deat h Experiences St udy Publ ished By Dr. Jerry Nol an In 2008, a large-scale study involving 2060 patients from 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria was launched. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK, examined the broad range of mental experiences in relation to death. Researchers also tested the validity of conscious experiences using objective markers for the first time in a large study to determine whether claims of awareness compatible with out-of-body experiences correspond with real or hallucinatory events. 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. Results of the study have been published in the journal Resuscitation and are now available online. The study concludes: - 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. Page 54 - August , 2015 Dr Sam Parnia, Assistant Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Director of Resuscitation Research at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, and the