In March 2012, the Bolton Wanderers midfielder Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field during a televised FA Cup match against Tottenham Hotspur. He had suffered a heart attack and was clinically dead, with no vital signs, for a considerable length of time. Remarkably, he survived, and has since described his impressions of what happened. At first, he said, he felt a surreal dizziness, as though he was running along inside someone else’s body. The last thing he remembers is seeing two of the Tottenham player Scott Parker. Interestingly, he reports no feeling of pain.
I can’t be the only person whose initial empathy for Muamba and his family was the starting point for a deeper reflection, above all concerning my future death. When will it come? (Hopefully, not for many years.) What will be its circumstances? (Peaceful, I hope.) And, very simply – what does it feel like to die?
In scientific literature, there are numerous reports of people who have had similar experiences to Muamba, many involving light. The oldest medical description of a near-death experience, from the 18th century, recounts the tale of a French apothecary who lost consciousness during blood-letting, a treatment believed by physicians at the time to relieve fever. He recalled “such a pure and extreme light that he thought he was in Heaven”. More recent recollections include seeing bright lights, sensations of entering an unearthly realm and occasionally the feeling of leaving the body and viewing it from above, known as an out-of-body experience.
Of course, we can’t tell how strange or unusual these memories actually are without knowing the number of people who survive clinical death without such recollections. In many cases, researchers were also asking people to recollect events that happened decades earlier, the details of which may have been changed, or lost in the mists of time. Then medical researcher Sam Parnia and his colleagues decided to take a more objective approach.
Fifteen years ago, Parnia’s team interviewed over a 12-month period 63 patients at Southampton General Hospital who were resuscitated following a heart attack. Of the 63, seven could recall thoughts from the time they were unconscious. They included coming to a point or border of no return, feelings of peace and, in one case, jumping off a mountain. So, while only a minority could remember being close to death, what could be recalled was generally positive.
Surprisingly, the patients able to recall their experiences actually had the highest blood-oxygen levels – feelings such as heightened sensual awareness had previously been thought to result from brain-oxygen starvation. Yet better brain oxygenation would allow for improved cognitive function during the resuscitation, explaining more vivid experiences and the ability to commit them to memory.
As part of the experiment, suspended boards with painted writing and figures on their upper sides were hung from ceilings throughout the hospital. Any patients reporting an out-of-body experience could then reasonably be asked to describe what they saw on the upper sides of the boards. This would have been very troublesome for prevailing scientific understanding – certainly, a rethink of human consciousness as something entirely dependent upon the billions-strong network of neurons in our brains. These simple devices had the capability of turning conventional neuroscience on its head.
However, no out-of-body experiences occurred in this patient group, so this ingenious idea was not properly tested. But the researchers weren’t finished yet – and have just published a new study. This time, it encompassed 15 US and European hospitals, and, unlike the earlier research, two resuscitated patients did recollect vivid out-of-body experiences.
One became aware of a woman up in one corner of the room beckoning to him, and the next moment he was up there, looking down at himself. He recalled hearing a voice saying: “Shock the patient, shock the patient.” And he could see a nurse and a bald-headed man wearing blue scrubs that he described as “quite a chunky fella”. The other remembered being “on the ceiling looking down” and seeing a nurse pumping his chest while a doctor was “putting something down my throat”.
Unfortunately, neither patient underwent resuscitation in areas where boards were positioned. The researchers got closer this time, but once more the opportunity to verify or refute out-of-body experience was missed.
Nonetheless, while researchers couldn’t test it, they perhaps demonstrated something more important. The astronomer Edwin Hubble said: “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” Scientific investigation is not all white coats, hi-tech gadgets and undecipherable equations, but rather its watchwords are fairness and objectivity. Some simple and elegant painted wooden boards illustrate this beautifully.
So, what does it feel like to die? As these studies record, death by cardiac arrest seems to feel either like nothing, or something pleasant and perhaps slightly mystical. The moments before death were not felt to be painful. We don’t know if this would extend to other causes of death, but still, it is reassuring. I take comfort from the notion that death is not necessarily something to be feared. Thanks to the stories of Fabrice Muamba, the patients of Southampton hospital and others, we can rest easier as we carry on our lives in death’s ever-present, if perhaps now slightly fainter, shadow.
