The question has plagued mankind for thousands of years, and recently, two famous British doctors conducted the world's first scientific study of "near-death experiences" and found that the human spirit, commonly known as the "soul", will continue to exist in the world after the brain has ceased to function. The results of this study will once again set off a great debate about "life after death".

"Coming back from the dead" in medicine

The British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph said the study was co-led by Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at the London Institute of Psychiatry, and Dr. Parnia, a doctor at Southampton Hospital. They interviewed 63 patients who had recovered their lives after a heart attack within a week of the onset of illness. All of them were declared medically dead at one point, but were later resuscitated after resuscitation.

According to Ming Pao reports, 56 of the survivors had no memory of what happened when they lost consciousness of a heart attack. However, the remaining seven have memories of the brink of death, and four of them have passed the "Grayson Index," a rigorous medical measure designed to test near-death experiences.

Arrived at the "place of no return"

The four said they felt peaceful and pleasant during the experience, time passed rapidly, their five senses increased, they became less aware of the existence of their shells, they saw a light, they entered another world, they encountered a mysterious object, and they reached a "place from which there is no turning back." Three of them claimed to be Protestants who had failed to fulfill their religious responsibilities, while others saw themselves as apostate Catholics.

Many scholars believe that the so-called unique experience of people before death is actually caused by a lack of oxygen in the brain. However, after reviewing the patients' medical reports, the two doctors pointed out that none of the four near-death experience people had cerebral hypoxia, so that rebuttal is not valid. In addition, they do not believe that the occult experience was caused by drug stimulation, as the rescue procedures in the hospital are the same for everyone.

Is the brain just an intermediary of the mind?

"These people have experienced things that we didn't think would happen, they were on the verge of death at the time, and the brain shouldn't be able to think or form memories that can be kept," Dr. Parnia said. With these observations, perhaps we can understand whether the mind or consciousness is generated by the brain or does it exist independently.

Is the brain just an intermediary of the mind?

Dr. Fenwick said, "If the spirit and the brain are independent, it raises the question of whether the spirit continues after death, and it raises the question of whether human beings have souls, and whether human beings exist by chance or for another purpose."

Dr. Parnia said that he was a skeptic himself, but after looking at all this evidence, he began to think that there is something that survives after death, "If the brain is only an intermediary of the mind, just as the television is just an intermediary of the conversion of radio waves into images, then we can confirm that the spirit is still present after the brain dies." “

The study will be published in the prestigious medical journal Resuscitation next year. However, the two stressed that more research is still needed.

Millions of people in the United States claim to have near-death experiences

Since ancient times, many people have claimed to have near-death experiences, and a NDE sharing website in the United States claims that as many as 8 million to 12 million people in the United States have such experiences, which is about the same as the current population of New York.

Most of these people claim to have seen bright lights and angel-like objects, but this is disputed by most scholars.

However, the patients interviewed by Fenwick and Parnia, who were pronounced dead by doctors, recalled their near-death experiences after their resurrection are the strongest medical evidence to date. Since this meant that a person's consciousness or mind could survive after brain death, the study was praised by the British religious community as supporting the credibility of religious beliefs.

Bishop Sykes, professor of theology at Durham University, described the findings as encouraging because they challenged the idea that the spirit would die with the body, and Bishop Rowell, Bishop of Anglican Basingstoke, said it proved that man is more than just a "flesh and blood computer".

However, Frank Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of London, is still skeptical of the study, suggesting that the phenomenon of near-death experiences may simply be a means by which the human brain "rationalizes" unusual events.