busyTime of death is considered when a person has gone into cardiac arrest. This is the cessation of the electrical impulse that drive the heartbeat. As a result, the heart locks up. The moment the heart stops is considered time of death. But does death overtake our mind immediately afterward or does it slowly creep in?
This depends a lot on the manner of death.
Some forms of death extinguish consciousness long before the body fails, which happens in many progressive illnesses, and some other things like freezing to death. This is the same as any other loss of consciousness, just waking up somewhere other than your body in whatever afterlife you favor.
A similar but more brutal example occurs with dementia where the brain slowly decays such that less and less of the consciousness can inhabit it, which is kind of like trying to do important work on a computer that keeps crashing, until you say "Fuck it!" and walk away into your next life.
Some forms of death are instant or near-instant, particularly those that destroy the brain (like a gunshot to the head) or disconnect the brain from the body (like decapitation). These are among the most prone to make the soul get lost, as it doesn't have time to realize the death and launch properly. It can be a tremendous shock -- not quite pain, because that system isn't connected anymore, but something exactly as unpleasant as pain. One weird example that can happen with projectile weapons is that they seem to "catch" the soul and tear it out of the body, sort of like yanking a cloak off someone. Occasionally people who don't realize they're dead may suddenly find themselves in one of the between places, usually interpreted as a bus station or other travel hub. If this happens, just stand still and wait a bit: there are spirits who watch for lost souls and will present a menu of options. Or if you can see a ticket counter, go there, those spirits are trained to handle lost souls too.
Another odd effect is that sometimes dying doesn't feel like anything happening to you, just your body suddenly falls off and lands on the ground and you can't connect with it. This can be temporary -- sometimes "turn it off and back on" actually works to fix certain problems -- or permanent. It can happen with sudden physical effects such as a heart attack or stroke, but also with unexplained things where the person just stops being alive.
Slower traumatic death can be a lot like hatching. At some point you decide that you want the hell out of that experience and start struggling to break free. Eventually you rip your way out of your body and lie there panting for a while until you remember that, oh right, you don't need to breathe anymore and nothing hurts now. Not fun, but if you know what you're doing you can greatly shorten the time of unpleasantness.
Death in its proper time, usually at the end of a long life but sometimes a shorter one, can feel a lot like giving birth to yourself. A rhythm of effort and breath, with or without pain, pushing your way through a tunnel into the light and a whole lot of people yelling because they're so happy to see you.
Dying while asleep is exactly like falling asleep any other time, only instead of waking up back in your body the next morning, you wake up somewhere else, in whatever afterlife you have subscribed to.
Dying slowly while awake, of something that isn't too traumatic, is also a lot like falling asleep. If you've ever paid really close attention to the subjective cognitive process of falling asleep, you can observe your thoughts slowing down and drifting further apart. And then, just as your sleeping mind restarts in dream mode, your dying mind restarts in afterlife mode; the two are similarly phantasmagoric from the perspective of the material world, but each makes sense in its own context.
Particularly in the case of slow or otherwise expected deaths, previously deceased friends or family show up as escorts -- sometimes days or weeks in advance, to participate in the leavetaking ceremonies. At some point you decide to go with them.
Similarly, if you have a good relationship with Death or other assigned entities such as angels, they may provide an escort. Most religions have one or more parties responsible for making sure that souls on their path get where they're going safely. When the party is over and it's time to go Home, don't cling to the living room until the host pitches you puking onto the lawn, and don't scream or throw things at the dedicated driver. Be polite and you can have a fun conversation on the way to your next destination.
Some scientists have studied near death experiences (NDEs) to try to gain insights into how death overcomes the brain. What they've found is remarkable, a surge of electricity enters the brain moments before brain death. One 2013 study out of the University of Michigan, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found they entered a hyper-alert state just before death.
That's the kickoff. When the brain and mind have even a few seconds to prepare for death, it goes a lot easier. That activity is kind of like lighting the fuse on a rocket -- or entering an upload on a computer. It's a really big surge of energy, because souls are big, even the little bit that fits into a body. Missing that upload surge, or crashing in the middle of it, really sucks and can cause malfunctions in the death process.
Related to this, souls have some ability to hold on, for example to deliver a last message; or to use the energy of the kickoff to push someone else toward life, using the standard principle of an equal and opposite reaction, sometimes seen when a woman dies in childbirth and her formerly floundering infant suddenly rallies.
In previous work, he's conducted animal studies looking at the moments before and after death. He's also investigated near death experiences. “Many times, those who have had such experiences talk about floating around the room and being aware of the medical team working on their body," Dr. Parnia told Live Science. “They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them."
You can tell the difference between a death event when the soul leaves the body, a residual sensory effect, and a hallucination. The soul will change perspective and may notice things the body could not (e.g. seeing things out of view, perceiving information by direct knowledge), and which are factual. A residual sensory effect will be locked to the body's perspective, but which are still factual. A hallucination will be partially or wholly nonfactual.
Even after our breathing and heartbeat stops, we're conscious for about 2–20 seconds, Dr. Parnia says. That's how long the cerebral cortex is thought to last without oxygen. This is the thinking and decision-making part of the brain. It's also responsible for deciphering the information gathered from our senses.
According to Parnia during this period, "You lose all your brain stem reflexes — your gag reflex, your pupil reflex, all that is gone." Brain waves from the cerebral cortex soon become undetectable. Even so, it can take hours for our thinking organ to fully shut down.
This is why so many religions have elaborate rituals around death and how the dead are to be treated. Most helpfully, some traditions including Egyptian and Tibetan have someone read the instruction manual to the departing soul. If the soul is on the right path, this is comforting; if they've gotten lost, it is rescuing. This is most important in cases where the soul is likely to be disoriented in some way, to help them get where they're going. The surviving version of the Book of Going Forth by Day (Egyptian Book of the Dead) has a bit missing. There's supposed to be a call-and-response for the litany of sins, either "I have not done X," or "I have atoned for doing X by doing Y," then "And my heart is as light as a feather: move on." (If you haven't atoned, you are likely to be eaten, so clean up as you go along if you are following an Egyptian tradition.)
Usually, when the heart stops beating, someone performs CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). This will provide about 15% of the oxygen needed to perform normal brain function. "If you manage to restart the heart, which is what CPR attempts to do, you'll gradually start to get the brain functioning again," Parnia said. “The longer you're doing CPR, those brain cell death pathways are still happening — they're just happening at a slightly slower rate."
The part of rescue work that people rarely mention, and most training explicitly denies, is thinking about when to stop because you could be doing more harm than good. The brain can last 4-5 minutes without oxygen and have some chance of revival, but the quality of life declines rapidly. Most people who have a heart attack, drown, etc. cannot be revived. Of those who are, the ones with the fastest first aid have the best chance of a good recovery. The problem is that it's sometimes possible to save people who suffer a lot of brain damage, or are revived briefly but then die again. Somewhere in there, often around 10 minutes but varying based on things like cause of arrest and temperature, it's better to quit than risk hitting that gutter. Really. Gutterballs suck for the victim and everyone around them. If you are doing first aid or other rescue work, you have a responsibility to consider the probable quality of outcome. You can use training, statistics, subtle senses, whatever the hell you can reach -- but THINK about it, don't abdicate.
I wrote a lot about this in "Loss Is Like a Wind" and its notes.
Dr. Parnia's latest, ongoing study looks at large numbers of Europeans and Americans who have experienced cardiac arrest and survived. "In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of 'love,'" he said, "we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die."
See above regarding the diversity of death experiences, and that's just a sample of the immediate process with a few bits of different spiritual traditions. While everyone dies, the experience is definitely not universal. Same with birth. And on that note, it is much more likely to be awesome and less likely to be miserable if you know what you are doing and can do it in a defensible position with helpful assistance, rather than in enemy hands or having no fucking clue. Be prepared, it can save your death.
"At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death," Parnia said, “to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you've died for some period of time — and how that relates to what's happening inside the brain in real time."
Well, we know consciousness survives for some time after death because a few people die and are revived.
Evidence for longer continuation includes:
* Energy is neither created nor destroyed.
* Nature wastes nothing; everything gets recycled. Dead stars are reborn as planets teeming with life.
* People don't stop loving each other just because one is dead.
* Some people remember other lives, sometimes complete with skills not taught in the current life.
* EVERY human society has some religion, and there are a lot of common features, including belief in an immortal soul. The details vary, but it is impossible to stamp out spirituality -- people have tried -- because it respawns. It has to be coming from somewhere.
