The phenomenon of “life after death”. What does science say about it?

Life after death does not exist, and obtaining evidence for its possible manifestations would require knowledge of physics far beyond the standards, argues the famous American physicist Dr. Sean Caroll. Yet scientists continue to search for them, and dying remains the greatest mystery to man. After all, the fact that we do not see or know something does not mean that it does not exist.

  1. For decades, scientists have been trying to explore the essence of the dying process and are looking for evidence of the existence of life after the death of the human body. However, there are few of them
  2. One of the greatest phenomena of medicine is still the issue of clinical death and patients’ experiences related to the so-called NDE (near-death experience)
  3. The most important conclusion from the research of various generations of scientists is that human death is not a short moment, but a longer process in which consciousness, memory, emotions, genes and the body gradually die.
  4. More information can be found on the TvoiLokony home page

One Filipino resident claimed that her body reeked of rotting fish and insisted that she be placed in a morgue. There was also a known case of a 32-year-old Iranian who was reported to therapy by his family. He was convinced that no one was paying attention to him because he was dead. At first, he felt something like electrical discharges in various parts of his body. Then, he claimed, the organs changed. These people considered themselves dead in life, and the causes were seen in the so-called Cotard’s disease, an extremely rare mental disorder, also known as the “living dead syndrome”«.

The reasons for this type of delusion have so far not been found, and the disease poses a challenge not only from a medical point of view, but also from an intellectual and social point of view. Certainly, it can also provoke reflections on the separation of body and soul and the fact that death can sometimes only concern one of them. So far, scientists have found evidence that death is a process that in many cases may take longer than we think.

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Gene activity after death

Reflections, belief in the afterlife and “dead” delusions, however, are only one side of the coin. The second and most important is the research and findings of scientists who seek to explore the essence of death. There are few findings and evidence that perhaps after death “something” remains, there are few and it is difficult to base any statements on them. We recently wrote that the brain – human or animal – can remain active for a short time after death. Scientists also found similar gene activity.

A few years ago, the scientific journal Open Biology published the results of a study on gene expression in dead mice and some fish species. The point was to check whether expression is abruptly and definitively interrupted after death, or whether this process occurs gradually. Researchers have found a surprising thing: after death, over a thousand genes become more active. In some cases, this condition lasted as long as four days. This concerned mainly genes related to stress reactions and the functioning of the immune system, but also those responsible for the development of the organism.

– We did not expect such a result – said prof. Peter Noble, author of the study, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, quoted by “Przekrój”. – It’s hard to imagine: we took samples 24 hours after the organism died and found that the transcription frequency increased. We were very surprised.

The results of the study indicated that death is gradual, not a one-off, sudden event.

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Human stories versus the laws of physics

Dr. Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology believes there is no way that human consciousness can be able to separate itself from the physical body. In his opinion the laws of physics, already at the most basic level of the structure of matter, do not allow particles of a dead body to move our consciousness anywhere.

– Of course, we do not know all the laws for the entire universe, but the terrestrial ones that determine the behavior of electricity and the molecules that make up our brains, where consciousness is located, have been known quite accurately – wrote the scientist, quoted by Focus.pl.

Nevertheless, the history of science remembers many cases of people who experienced different kinds of visions during clinical death or after the cessation of heartbeat and before resuscitation. Scientists explain it differently. Dr. Caroll says that Before death, people often have hallucinations that explain the phenomena they describe.

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  2. Clinical death – what it is, symptoms, chances of survival. Clinical death and biological death

According to Time.com, according to a Gallup poll, about 8 million Americans say they have had a near-death experience (NDE), and many consider the experience to be evidence of an afterlife – a parallel, spiritual realm.

One of the people who dealt with these kinds of experiences, mainly on a spiritual level, was Raymond Moody, who in 1975 wrote Life After Life, one of the first and most popular books on the near death experience. It was he who, on the basis of several hundred descriptions of such experiences, distinguished over a dozen common elements that appeared in different people, regardless of age, gender, religion or nationality.

This includes the sequence of describing the various stages of dying, as well as the often positive, even ecstatic feelings that accompany them. According to some scientists, effects of this type are probably associated with disturbances in the functioning of the brain, such as in a state of clinical death, resulting from cerebral ischemia.

First the soul dies, and finally the body

Interesting evidence that a person does not die right away can be found in a recent study by Dr. Cameron Shaw. He told about them to Vice.com. He decided to find out what was happening to the body 30 seconds before his death. He conducted the research on the body of a woman who agreed to share her corpse for the sake of science. Dr. Shaw explains where tunnel vision comes from in those dying or experiencing clinical death.

Tunnel vision occurs when there is a disruption in blood supply to the brain. The first thing you see when you pass out is narrowed vision followed by darkness, said the neurologist. He also added that at the time of death, the brain shuts down in stages. In the first place, those features that make us human are gone, responsible, among others, for self-awareness, sense of humor, memories and speech skills.

When all these areas of the brain stop working, a person goes into a vegetative state. So “the soul” dies first, and finally the body.

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