![3 minutes before death 3 minutes before death](https://earthlymission.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/chernobyl-pictures-before-after-11.jpg)
When Tiralosi arrived, they cooled him, which helped preserve his brain cells. We'd been working with the emergency room to make sure they knew the importance of starting to cool people down. Parnia: I wasn't involved in his care when he arrived at the hospital, but I know his doctors well. Wired: One of the first after-death accounts in your book involves Joe Tiralosi, who was resuscitated 40 minutes after his heart stopped. Combined with anecdotal reports from all over the world, from people who see things accurately and remember them, it suggests this needs to be studied in more detail. Not just my study, but four others, all demonstrated the same thing: People have memories and recollections. That's the physiology of people who've died or are receiving CPR. When doctors start to do CPR, they still can't get enough blood into the brain. There's no blood flow into the brain, no activity, about 10 seconds after the heart stops. When I looked at the cardiac arrest literature, it became clear that it's after the heart stops and blood flow into the brain ceases. I found that 10 percent of patients who survived cardiac arrests report these incredible accounts of seeing things. Parnia: I decided that we should study what people have experienced when they've gone beyond cardiac arrest. Wired: You also study near-death experiences, but you have a different term for it: After-death experience. The process of freezing will damage cells.
![3 minutes before death 3 minutes before death](https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4394994.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/People-still-conscious-for-up-to-3-minutes-after-death.jpg)
But we're talking about chilling, not freezing. Making the body cold slows the rate at which cells decay. If your body is cold, the chemical reactions underlying apoptosis are slower. When you die, most of your cell death occurs through apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Whether it's because the heart stopped pumping, or there was a clot that stopped blood flow, the cells don't care. A stroke is some process that stops blood flow from getting into the brain. Parnia: Death is, essentially, the same as a stroke, and that's especially true for the brain. Wired: How can people be brought back from death? It might not just be in tens of minutes, but in over an hour. But nobody knows exactly when that moment is. There's going to be a time when you can't bring them back. Of course, if someone dies and you leave them alone long enough, the cells become damaged.
![3 minutes before death 3 minutes before death](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/b9026b1602218.5600f2475c2dc.jpg)
We know now that when you become a corpse, when the doctor declares you dead, there's still a possibility, from a biological and medical perspective, of death being reversed. We have a longer period of time than people perceive. It takes time for cells to die after they're deprived of oxygen. That led to the perception that death is completely irreversible.īut if I were to die this instant, the cells inside my body wouldn't have died yet. Until fifty years ago, when CPR was developed, when you reached this point, you couldn't come back. Sam Parnia: There's a point used to define death: Your heart stops beating, your brain shuts down.