New evidence shows that life can continue up to three minutes after death.
A team of researchers in the UK examined 2,060 patients who survived of cardiac arrest and were at one point were declared clinically dead, reports Times of India. They found that 46 percent of these patients still had some amount of "awareness" of what was going on around them.
The accuracy of some patients' reccolection of the time they spent clinically dead is astonishing to doctors.
"We know the brain can't function when the heart has stopped beating," Dr. Sam Parnia, an assistant professor at the State University of New York and a former research fellow at the University of Southampton who led the research, explains to Times of India. "But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes."
He continues, "The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for. He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened."
The study was published in the journal Resuscitation.
