What is "Mind?"

Similarly, we understand the number 0.33333... by thinking of it as one-third.

Afterall religion is a construct of the mind, Right? So they say..

The largest medical study ever performed on near-death experiences has led researchers to suggest that consciousness can last up to three minutes after a person’s heart and brain have shut down.
near-death

The idea that consciousness can continue on after your heart stops beating and your brain stops functioning is a pretty wild one, and naturally courts a lot of scepticism. But the more scientists study the supposed phenomenon, the more certain trends are reinforced, giving us a glimpse into what actually might occur when we die.

A team of scientists at the University of Southampton in the UK has just finished a four-year study of 2,060 people who experienced cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals across the UK, the US, and Austria. Having conducted interviews with each of the 330 people who survived about their memories of the event, the researchers found that 40 percent of them felt ‘aware’ for the period of time that they were declared clinically dead. The medical staff at the hospitals successfully restarted their hearts so they could live to tell the tale.

According to The National Post, one man participating in the study described the feeling that he was watching his treatment from the corner of the room, while a female participant was able to recount exactly the actions of the nursing staff that resurrected her over a three-minute period. She could even very accurately describe the sound of the machines that surrounded her ‘dead’ body.

“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating, but in this case conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds after the heart has stopped,” Sam Parnia, the study leader and a former assistant professor of medicine at Southampton University, told The National Post. He’s now based at the State University of New York in the US.

“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,” said Parnia.

While not all of the people who survived the ordeal recalled some sort of experience in clinical death, perhaps because the medication they were given was messing with their brain function, The National Post reports that certain trends emerged from the 40 percent that did. One in five reported feeling peaceful, and a third said they felt time either speed up or slow down. Some described bright lights, others described feeling detached from their bodies. Some felt scared that they were drowning.

“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death, but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best,” Parnia told The National Post. “Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions, but they do seem to correspond to actual events. These experiences warrant further investigation.”

Of course, any research into what actually goes on after death will always be controversial, due to the enormous difficulties in gathering enough evidence to support much of anything that’s scientifically sound, but studies like this are at least an intriguing starting point.

The study was published in the journal Resuscitation.

The brain, it turns out, has a GPS-like function that enables people to produce mental maps and navigate the world