What If You Wake Up After You're Pronounced Dead? | Unveiled

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What If You Wake Up After You’re Pronounced Dead?</h4>

The modern human has an average life expectancy of around 73 years old. There are some 8 billion people in the world, with around 60 million of them dying every year. Due to birth rates that rise at about double the pace, the global population is still increasing… but it’s a fact that today, at our current level of evolution and advancement, death is still an inevitable part of life. All living things do have a limit.

As a result, humanity is still routinely sidetracked into contemplating its own impermanence. In both an individual and societal sense, we’re always acutely aware that nothing lasts forever, including ourselves. Psychologists believe that this is a fundamental driver behind why we do the things we do. For a select few, however, circumstances combine so that they really have managed to die twice.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if you wake up after you’re pronounced dead?

Somewhat surprisingly, there are a number of ways to define death, and the clinical, absolute moment of your passing is often understood differently in different parts of the world. The discrepancies mostly boil down to either cardiopulmonary, which is essentially heart death… or brain death. When your heart stops beating, or when your brain stops functioning. The tricky aspect, however, is that the legal definition of death isn’t universally set, creating something of a gray area between the two.

In some cases, that gray area is partly to blame for the stories we’re about to encounter. In other cases, malpractice is to blame, or simply unexpected - even unparalleled - situations. Meanwhile, the accepted signs of death can be misinterpreted, as well. Nevertheless, and whatever the reason, these are some of the most shocking examples of people waking up after they’ve been declared dead.

First, to the case of Walter Williams; a man from Mississippi who, in 2014, was found unresponsive in his home and declared dead at the scene. A short while later, Williams was taken to a local funeral home, where embalmers began preparing his body for burial. To everyone's astonishment, however, he started moving and breathing. The medical community later attributed his resurrection to a condition known as Lazarus Syndrome, where the heart spontaneously starts beating again even after failed attempts at resuscitation. What’s unusual, though, is that no one’s sure exactly how the Lazarus Syndrome works, only that it is extremely rare. Unfortunately, Williams’ second life was short-lived, as he died just 15 days after coming back around. But, in the intervening time he was reportedly healthy enough to spend it conscious and talking with his family. 

Next, the incredible story of Lyudmila Steblitskaya. A Russian woman in her early 60s, her doctors declared her dead after a short stay in hospital, in 2012. She was then placed in a morgue, and preparations for her funeral had begun. Members of her family had even reportedly ordered for her grave to be dug. But there was a dramatic u-turn, when her daughter arrived at the hospital to say her final goodbyes, only to discover that her mother was now alive and conscious. What’s especially amazing about this, however, is that Steblitskaya had spent three days in the morgue in the intervening time, with her body kept in freezing temperatures until she fortunately awoke just moments before her own autopsy.

Our third case is the in-coffin re-awakening of Angelo Hays. In 1937, Frenchman Angelo Hays was involved in a motorcycle accident that left him with severe head injuries. Soon after, doctors declared him dead and, according to reports, he was promptly buried. However, it transpired that Hays had only slipped into a deep coma, and when his body was exhumed - reportedly following question marks over an insurance claim - Hayes was discovered inside, but alive. It’s thought that, after his accident, his breathing had been so shallow that it hadn’t even registered on the recording devices of the time. But, eventually, after some weeks of rehabilitation, Hayes went on to live a long life, again defying the odds and again confounding medical professionals.

Case number four, and to Beiliu, China, where in 2012 a 95-year old woman shocked her community by seemingly returning to life six days after having died. Li Xiufeng’s story made headlines all over the world, when she was first found unresponsive in her home by neighbors and, after multiple attempts to revive her, was declared dead. As per the local custom, Li Xiufeng’s body was then placed in an open coffin for a period of time, to allow those who knew her to pay their respects. There was seemingly nothing unusual about the situation until the sixth day, when visitors were confused to find the coffin suddenly empty. According to reports, Li Xiufeng had simply woken up, stepped out of her own casket, and was found by her friends in her kitchen, busily cooking.

Our penultimate story is that of Velma Thomas, who first suffered a severe heart attack at her home in West Virginia, in 2008. According to reports, she also fell victim to multiple other cardiac arrests enroute to (and inside) the hospital where doctors would ultimately declare her dead. It’s said that she was clinically dead with zero brain activity for more than seventeen hours, and that her life support was switched off. But then, when doctors were preparing Thomas’ body for organ donation, the procedure was swiftly halted because, despite the apparent impossibility, she started to breathe again. As with Walter Williams, Velma Thomas’s experience has largely been put down to an example of the Lazarus Syndrome. Although, again, medical professionals just aren’t sure exactly how it was that she managed to pull through.

And, finally, to the frozen miracle of Jean Hilliard. Hilliard was found frozen literally solid in sub-zero temperatures in Minnesota. After her car had broken down she had gone to find help, but got caught in a blizzard and was discovered 6 hours later - literally frozen stiff. When she was brought to the hospital, she was in such a bad way that her body temperature was reportedly too low to register on a standard thermometer. Given the situation, her doctors very nearly declared her dead. But her family insisted on keeping her body at the hospital. And, incredibly, Hilliard did soon begin to thaw. Then, after a few hours, she regained consciousness. Her astounding recovery challenged conventional notions of when a person is truly beyond revival because, when she arrived at the hospital her body was literally lifeless… but after only a few hours, that life had returned in full.

In all of these cases, we see the extraordinary and unpredictable nature of life even after someone finds themselves declared dead. And, while each story is unique, they collectively contribute to the broader discussion about the limits of medical certainty and the potential for unexpected recoveries. There are huge ethical implications here, to challenge our understanding of death and to underscore the need for continued research into when it really is the point of no return.

For now, what’s important to remember is that, while there are yet more examples out there, waking up after being pronounced dead is still an exceedingly rare phenomenon. For the overwhelming majority of the time, there is no reason to doubt a diagnosis of death. And what’s clear is that, in the cases when mistakes have been made, there is at least time enough following death to allow for a miraculous revival. 

For all the people that we’ve covered in this video, they found themselves in a highly unusual position. For them, death actually wasn’t the end. To some extent, it might be said that they lived through the experience of dying. Sometimes they were able to survive for just a short while more; other times they went on to live long lives that they might have otherwise been denied. But, their stories all stand as testament to the fact that medical science, for all its immeasurable advancements, does still encounter situations that challenge even our most fundamental understandings of life.

Looking into the future, and technologists might expect any and all confusion over death to be avoided in the coming generations, as we edge ever closer to genuine immortality in whichever guise. But, for now, this seeming gray area between life and death is of extreme importance. Because, while it doesn’t happen often, it seems that it is possible to visit death and return.

Everything lives, everything dies, and the world keeps on turning. That’s the general idea, anyway, right? Well, yes, except that we humans have an innate and ancient tendency to imagine that this life isn’t all there is. That there’s something else beyond this mortal coil… some other place to which we’re all headed.

So, this is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; is life after death possible?

The concept of life after death can be debated from three main angles: Faith, science and technology. In terms of Faith and theology, some refer to heaven and hell, everlasting paradise, or reincarnation. Then, there are various more scientific and academic approaches pertaining to the preservation of consciousness. And finally, there are the more technological answers, imagining a future time when life can be saved and digitalized via machine.

Through the lens of Faith, today’s question is really an irrelevant one. Of course life after death is possible, if you believe strongly enough. With science and technology, though, the answer isn’t quite so straightforward.

The tricky matter of consciousness is key. It’s something which has long puzzled the world’s foremost thinkers, philosophers and scientists. What is it? Where’s it located? And what happens to it when our physical bodies are no more? René Descartes is usually billed as the flagbearer for the modern debate, thanks to his belief that our consciousness is the only thing we can actually be truly certain of - the basis of his often-quoted, seventeenth century mantra; I think, therefore I am.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, however, and the debate is still in full swing. In 2015, Oliver Burkeman (writing for the Guardian) asked why the world’s greatest minds still couldn’t solve the mystery of consciousness? In his article, he referred back to a mid-90s science conference when one David Chalmers referred to the issue of consciousness as “the Hard Problem” - a term which eventually inspired a 2015 play by Sir Tom Stoppard. 

For Chalmers, when it comes to the brain, there are many easy problems and one hard one. The easy problems are things like how do our senses work? and how do we remember stuff? In reality, these questions actually aren’t at all simple to answer… but they’re still a breeze compared to the hard problem which, for Chalmers, is… how do all of those other problems amount to experience? How is it that, yes, we see colours, feel pain, hear the waves crashing on the rocks at night… but, crucially, are left with a sense of being irrespective of all of that?

But what does this scientific-philosophical quandary have to do with the question at the top of today’s video; is life after death possible? Well, for as long as science cannot absolutely align consciousness with a physical, material thing - with a specific part of the brain, for example - there’s an argument that it doesn’t need our bodies (or brains) to carry on. And then, there are any number of things it could do post-body and post-brain… all of which amount to some form of afterlife. 

This is just one interpretation, though. For many, the expectation is that we will one day be able to definitely say that consciousness is the product of the human body, and probably of the human brain. We will one day be able to solve Chalmers’ Hard Problem. At which point we might try to encapsulate consciousness, prolong it or create an artificial version of it to potentially live forever - more on that shortly! But, at that hypothetical, future stage, we could very confidently claim that life after death is possible.

What’s interesting, though, is that according to one study, we might have already measured it. In 2014, the AWARE study - an acronym for “Awareness During Resuscitation” - was published by a team from Southampton University in the UK. It charted the apparently conscious experiences had by those who had survived a cardiac arrest… in between the time of clinical death and their heart restarting (a period when their consciousness should’ve shut down). For almost half of the heart attack survivors, results suggested that there was some level of awareness post death. They could see or hear what was going on around them, or they built memories of it… or even suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, linked to it. In all cases, to some degree, it could be said that the patients were alive after dying. 

But, still, the widely held expectation is that even if death is like this - even if there is a between-time when a dying person is conscious of their fate - then it should only last for a few minutes. At which point the Hard Problem of consciousness regains its mysterious hold, and the apparent afterlife ends. It’s this window between life and death, then, that science and technology most wants to open up. If there is any moment at which a person’s essence of life remains even when their physical body does not, then growing numbers of people want to bottle that moment up. 

It may sound like a sci-fi writer’s dream dystopia, but in the modern world we are trying to relocate consciousness out of organic bodies and into more reliable, less perishable ones. But, before we do this, we need a watertight understanding of what it is we’re trying to move. The race is on to map the human brain!

So far, we’ve made big steps in the right direction. In July 2019, news broke that scientists had managed to complete the connectome of a tiny species of worm. A connectome is essentially a brain map. It details every single neural connection inside a brain. And the 2019 news represented the first time we’d fully completed the connectome of any organism. Now, the structure of worm brains is something we can confidently say we know about. And it’s something that we could potentially recreate over and over again.

The jump from worm to human brains is, clearly, a considerable one. But these early successes prove that it will, one day, be possible. And, at a future time when we can map not only the human brain in general, but also specific brains from person to person… we could end up with effective blueprints for every human being. The personalities, individual traits, and even consciousnesses of everyone… translated into data.

But where would we go from here? It’s one thing to have the maps and diagrams of a brain to pore over and work from, but it’s another thing to go ahead and build it! And even if we could… would this ever truly constitute as life after death? Is, say, a recreation of your brain and consciousness inside an android of the future really the same thing as your brain (as it is) right now? If science heads in this direction, then very quickly these will be the sorts of ethical questions that the world would be facing.

Thankfully, before all of those future problems arise, however, our quest to preserve life even after death is likely to yield a number of other positive discoveries. The Human Connectome Project is arguably one of the most forward-thinking and ambitious initiatives on the planet today, as it represents the biggest effort we’ve made so far to map the human brain. It’s a joint project linking a number of the world’s best universities and hospitals, and its primary goal actually isn’t life after death. It’s just that understanding the potential for life after death could be an offshoot of the study. In the meantime, it aims to get to grips with all manner of neurological conditions and brain disorders - ranging from depression to psychosis to Alzheimer’s disease. The general idea is that once we’ve gotten to grips with our brains, it’s possible that the entire human race could benefit. 

So, the answer is three-fold. The afterlives we’re told about via various religions and alternate worldviews rely on Faith, and for as long as you have Faith then whichever afterlife you subscribe to is deemed possible. Many scientists among us are more interested in the nature of consciousness, though… and in deciphering once and for all why - in some cases - it appears to extend until after we die, creating to some degree a life after death, once more. 

But finally, for the technologists in our midst, life after death will surely be possible in the future. All we need to do is successfully map the human brain, tweak our connectomes so that they can apply to everyone, and then design some sort of digital, android world in which to house them all. Which camp do you fall into? Do you view the afterlife as a concept to believe in, a science to master, or a tech breakthrough waiting to happen? Because that’s why life after death is possible.