The Art of Resurrection

Resurrection, Raffaellino del Garbo (1510)In the world outside of Christianity, horror, and science fiction, the dead cannot be brought back to life. Or can they? A feature in the The Observer from earlier this year profiled Dr. Sam Parnia, critical care physician and author of Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (called The Lazarus Effect in the UK). The article begins in a dramatic fashion:Sam Parnia – the man who could bring you back from the deadSam Parnia MD has a highly sought after medical speciality: resurrection. His patients can be dead for several hours before they are restored to their former selves, with decades of life ahead of them.That's a pretty outrageous claim! Clinically dead for several hours? No brain activity the entire time? Even if anyone could emerge alive and conscious from such a state (unless it's a state of suspended animation, perhaps), they'd have severe brain damage (as we'll see below). There'd be no way they could have encoded their near-death experiences (NDEs), much less remembered any light at the end of a tunnel or a soothing presence drawing them home.There may be a semantic problem here: the definition of “death.” I haven't read the book, but the issue is described in a one-star review at Amazon:The core of this linguistic mess is his inconsistent use of the word "death". At times he uses this term properly, as defined by the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA, 1981): "An in...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs