Terrifying Study Reveals Our Brains Are Self-Aware After We Die

We are all morbidly curious about what happens to us after we die. As it turns out, a lot happens.

We're not talking about the blinding white light or floating outside your body like a ghost. This research reveals something much more scary. Our brains are still working even after our hearts stop.

Dr. Sam Parnia from New York University Langone School of Medicine and her team sought out to find more answers about death and the unknown. They spent hours looking into studies conducted worldwide on all the strange phenomenons that have occurred after a person has died. They were startled to find how many people have suffered from cardiac arrest and then came back to life.

You've probably heard about people who have flatlined in a hospital, then described feeling their consciousness leave their body and float over the doctors fighting to save their life. Even creepier, they were able to report facts that were verified by those doctors about the details surrounding their resuscitation that they wouldn't have been able to guess. They live to tell their strange tales that only make us more desperate for some answers.

According to doctors, death occurs as soon as the heart stops beating because this is when the blood supply to the brain is cut off.
 

After the heart stops, the brain's cerebral cortex, the area we use to think, slows down immediately until it flatlines. This means that doctors can measure that there is no brain activity happening in the patient. Total brain death occurs 2 to 20 seconds after the heart stops beating.

Parnia and his team wanted to study the effects of cardiac arrest and brain activity. Their mission is to discover the connections inside the body and learn if consciousness is wiped out instantly after the heart stops.

According to their widespread research, brain activity after death is not unusual.
 

One patient at a Canadian intensive care unit was found to have persistent brain activity for an astounding 10 minutes after cardiac arrest. However, 3 other patients under their care who have also been removed from their life support showed no signs of brain activity.

The researchers also uncovered that all of us experience death differently. This is backed by the differing brain wave patterns of each dead person. Each patient had their own unique electrical activity firing in their brain both before and after death. Perhaps this is why their are so many mysterious reports from those who have escaped death.

If you knew you had a few seconds of consciousness left before you died, what would you think about? Ask all of your friends for their opinion on this study.