First published November 20, 2017.
What the AWARE studies found — and what they did not
Accounts from survivors of cardiac arrest concern people who were resuscitated. They do not establish awareness after irreversible death or demonstrate an afterlife; the headline this article first carried, “Study Proves That Our Mind Still Works After Our Body Is Dead”, claims far more than the evidence shows.
Death, legally. Under the Uniform Determination of Death Act used across U.S. states, a person is dead only after irreversible cessation of circulation and breathing, or of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. Everyone interviewed in these studies was resuscitated, so by that standard none of them had died; the research is about cardiac arrest and CPR.
The 2014 AWARE study. Of 2,060 cardiac arrests in the multi-centre study, 140 survivors completed a first interview; 46% reported some memories, 9% described near-death experiences and 2% described awareness with explicit recall of seeing or hearing actual events during resuscitation. Only one of those accounts was judged to match what happened in the room in detail, and critics such as neurologist Steven Novella argued that a single, highly selected case cannot rule out memories formed before or after the arrest.
The 2023 AWARE II study. Of 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests, 53 patients (9.3%) survived; 28 were interviewed and 11 of them (39.3%) reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness, ranging from waking during CPR to dream-like or “transcendent” experiences. The study also tested for awareness directly. According to the paper’s abstract, it built independent audiovisual tests of awareness, including explicit and implicit learning, into CPR using a computer and headphones; nobody identified the visual image, one of the 28 interviewed survivors (3.5%) identified the auditory stimulus, and low survival limited the ability to examine implicit learning. Those are the published results. How the identification was tested is described only in secondary sources, because the full paper was not accessible for this article: Medical News Today reported that a recorded voice said “apple”, “pear” and “banana” every minute for five minutes, and a commentary in the Journal of Near-Death Studies states that survivors were first asked openly what they remembered, that those who recalled nothing were then asked to choose from the images and fruit names, and that the one auditory identification came only in that choice test. The same commentary notes that the paper does not describe the test in enough detail to judge the role of chance. The Psi Encyclopedia’s summary of the paper adds that no survivor spontaneously recalled the image or the sounds, and that none could pick out the visual image from a set of ten; the number of choices offered in the sound test is not given in these sources. EEG activity resembling normal patterns (delta, theta and alpha) appeared in some patients as long as 35–60 minutes into CPR (a finding widely reported at the time), but according to the same commentary, only two of the 28 interviewed survivors had readable EEGs, and neither of them remembered anything, so the brain recordings were not linked to the recollections. All of this concerns people undergoing CPR who were later revived; none of it is evidence of consciousness after irreversible death.
In short: well-documented data show that some resuscitated patients have vivid recollections and that the brain can show organised activity during CPR. The idea that the mind keeps working after death, or that people “know they are dead”, remains speculation that these studies did not test.
Ellen Page stars in Flatliners, a film about medical students who embark on a daring and dangerous experiment to find out what lies beyond the confines of life
A person's consciousness continues to work after their body has died, according to news reports of a study published in 2017. What really happens in near-death experiences has always been debated.
Those reports said scientists had found that a person's brain continues to work after their body has stopped showing signs of life, which they took to mean the person is aware of their own death. The research did not show that (see above): it found that a minority of resuscitated patients later recalled events, and none of them had died in the medical or legal sense.
Some reports went further and suggested that somebody who has died might even hear their death being announced by doctors. That idea rests on interviews with survivors of cardiac arrest, not on people who died.
The findings echo the plot of the new Hollywood remake of 1990s cult horror Flatliners, starring Ellen Page (now Elliot Page, who came out as transgender in December 2020). The film presents a group of young doctors who embark on a dangerous and daring experiment by taking turns to chemically induce their hearts to stop and flatline to discover exactly what happens in the afterlife.
A group from New York University Langone School of Medicine researched the same question through a large multi-centre study in Europe and the US (AWARE, published in 2014) of individuals who suffered cardiac arrest and 'came back' to life, in the most extensive study of its kind.
Study author Dr. Sam Parnia said these recollections were verified by medical and nursing staff who reported that their patients, who were technically dead, were able to remember details of what the staff was saying. In the published 2014 study, however, only one patient’s account was confirmed in detail, and “technically dead” here means in cardiac arrest, not legally dead.
Dr. Parnia described death, medically speaking, as the moment the heart stops beating, which then immediately cuts off blood supply to the human brain — what doctors call clinical death, or cardiac arrest. Legally, death is declared only when that loss of circulation, or of all brain function, is irreversible.
The brain's cerebral cortex – the one responsible for thinking and processing information from the 5 senses – instantly flatlines, according to Dr. Parnia. That means that within 2 to 20 seconds, no brainwaves can be detected on an electric monitor. (Update, October 2026: In a study of brief, deliberately induced cardiac arrests in surgical patients, EEG changes began on average 10.2 seconds after the last normal heartbeat (Clute and Levy, Anesthesiology, 1990).)
That sparks a chain reaction of cellular processes which will result in the death of brain cells. Still, this can take hours after the heart has stopped, Dr. Parnia explained. (Update, October 2026: Brain cell death is usually considered swift and irreversible, but in 2019 Yale researchers reported in Nature that they had restored some cellular functions in pig brains four hours after death, while seeing no organised electrical activity of the kind associated with awareness (Yale News, 17 April 2019).)
Also, performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) that has not successfully revived a patient can still send some blood to the brain – about 15% of what it requires to function normally. Brain cell death is still happening, simply at a slightly slower rate, Dr. Parnia said. (Update, October 2026: Estimates vary widely. A 2019 systematic review of animal experiments found that during chest compressions carotid artery flow averaged 35.2% of baseline and cerebral blood flow 66.5%, with very large variation between studies (Lucchetta et al., Resuscitation, 2019).)
Reference: Daily Mail
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