Separation of Mind and Brain
What Happens When We Die?
Is the mind an extension of the brain or its own entity?
The relationship of the mind to the body has been a debate that’s raged on for centuries. Dr. Sam Parnia, critical care doctor, director of the Human Consciousness Project and author of “What Happens When We Die,” seeks to settle this debate through AWARE (AWAreness during Resuscitation), a division of the Human Consciousness Project. Find out what Parnia had to say when AOL Health sat down with him for an interview.
20 Ways to Live to 100
by Vicki Salemi
Ah, the fountain of youth. When it comes to aging gracefully, let's face it -- we want it all. We want to feel good, look good and, most of all, live a long, healthy life. Here are twenty ways to get your game on and hopefully live to 100 and beyond!
Get Married
Exchanging vows comes with its own medical perks. A study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showed the death rate for people who were unmarried was significantly higher compared to people who were married and living with their spouses. While the results were significant among the various unmarried subcategories such as divorced, separated, or widowed populations, it was significantly stronger for people who had never been married.
Laugh out Loud
Experts say that laughter is the best medicine. After all, it increases your immune system response, lowers blood sugar levels in diabetics, increases oxygen flow throughout your entire body and helps induce a state of relaxation promoting better sleep. The positive health effects are no laughing matter: according to the University of Maryland Medical Center, average blood flow typically increases 22 percent during and after bursts of laughter compared to a decrease in blood flow by 35 percent during mental stress.
Buy a Pet
Having a dog or cat in the house works wonders by reducing stress, lowering cholesterol and decreasing blood pressure, while increasing physical activity. For example, pet ownership has increased the percentage of people who survived one year after being hospitalized for heart problems. Only six percent of non-pet owners survived whereas 28 percent of pet owners survived. Plus, sharing affection and companionship toward a pet may simply make people smile.
Quit Smoking
Let's face it: smoking is bad for you. Really bad. Need proof? Based on data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adult male smokers lost approximately 13.2 years of their lives and female smokers lost 14.5 years of their lives because of smoking. Plus, chronic diseases caused by smoking tended to curtail the quality of life of smokers while they were still alive.
Exercise More
Exercise is all around good -- giving you the positive effects of increased endorphins and a reduced waistline. It makes your heart stronger by pumping more blood with less effort, lowers cholesterol and blood pressure, prevents and controls diabetes, strengthens bones and muscles and controls weight. Convinced yet? A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that participants who had moderate to high exercise routines lived 1.3 to 3.7 years longer than their couch potato counterparts.
Give Your Brain a Workout
Having a good workout isn't only limited to your body. Playing chess, reading newspapers, attending plays or finishing a crossword puzzle all have positive health results, experts say. Brain fitness is paramount to maintaining your cognitive abilities. According to one study by Neurology Online, people who mentally exercised their brains had a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment and a risk of Alzheimer's that was 2.6 times less than people who did not stimulate their mind.
Limit Sun Exposure
Wearing sunscreen, limiting your exposure to the sun during peak hours and wearing sunglasses are some ways to prevent skin damage and cancer. Considering skin cancer is the most common of cancer types -- more than one million cases are diagnosed each year in the U.S. -- prevention and early detection are key to prolonging your life.
Visit the Doctor Regularly
This one's a no brainer: seeing a general physician on an annual basis can significantly lengthen your life by catching ailments before they start or treating emerging ones. An annual exam should include a blood pressure check, cholesterol and sugar level screening, bone density test, and examination of the ears, nose, throat and reflexes. For instance, if high blood pressure is not found and treated, significant health problems such as heart disease, stroke, kidney failure or eye problems may result.
Eat Fish
Eating up to two portions of fish on a weekly basis is beneficial, reported the Harvard School of Public Health. In fact, eating fish could possibly cut the risk of death by heart disease by one-third. Here's why: omega-3's fatty acids are healthy. They keep blood from clotting, lower the amount of fats in the bloodstream and reduce the risk of obesity. Plus, they provide a lot of nutrients like selenium, antioxidants and protein. However, pregnant women and children need to limit their intake of high-mercury fish like swordfish, king mackerel and others.
How can you explain near-death experiences?
The evidence so far suggests that when the heart stops beating, there’s no blood flowing in the body, everything goes still. The brain shuts down in about 10 seconds. The interesting thing is – when we as doctors intervene and do vigorous chest compressions, and give drugs and shock the heart – despite all our best efforts, studies have shown we cannot get enough blood flow into the brain to get it started. This may go on for tens of minutes or an hour.
Well, what happens to the mind at that time? In my case, what happened to that patient? Is his mind there or not there? We expect the mind to stop working in a few seconds, and interestingly, though – in 5 independent studies, one of which was mine, 10 to 20 percent of people who have gone through clinical death will report some activity of their mind. It appears that some people have some form of consciousness present when there’s no brain activity.
What they describe is a near-death experience. It’s subjective and a dream-like state. They say, “I saw a tunnel, I saw a light,” the usual stuff. We can’t validate that. I can’t say whether your dream is not real or is real. A proportion of them come back and describe watching doctors and nurses doing specific things. The question is – does that really happen? Is it real? Doctors and nurses have confirmed what patients have said. People recall seeing things. Did they really see it? How did they see them? Or were they really at the ceiling?
The key point is that no one really in their right mind can deny this experience occurs. The easiest answer is that it must just be a trick of the mind, an illusion. The problem with that is when people come back and tell us exactly what happened [in the hospital room]. It’s not so easy to say it’s an illusion. It could be that it’s happening just as the brain shuts down or as the brain is recovering. For example, you might have a dream that you’ve been somewhere for a year, but it could be a microsecond in real time. It could be that as the brain was shutting down you had a quick experience. You felt like you were there the whole time. Putting aside the tunnels or lights, they come back and tell us specific details, “At 9:15 a.m., this may have happened.” And that was 10 or 20 minutes into the event.
The alternative explanation is that they do see things. People have their eye closed, maybe they happen to open their eyes, and they’re just gathering information and their brain collects that information. The point is that they did see things.
The mind is a mystery. We don’t understand, and it may be possible that the mind is non-local to the brain. If you ask quantum physicists, this is possible because we know at that level things can be non-local. They behave in a weird way.
What do you hope to achieve through this research? Medical advancement? A better understanding of death?
What we do in medicine benefits in society. If you suddenly discovered a cure for cancer, it’s a medical advancement but ultimately a social advancement. This is a medically-driven study that will benefit all of society. It’s important because we know very little about the mind and brain. In most circumstances, we can’t separate them. Only in clinical death and cardiac arrest, the mind and brain may be separated from each other. If they can be separated, then there are further implications in neuroscience.
A lot of what we do is to study what happens to the brain and the way we can improve resuscitation during cardiac arrest and improve the way we manage patients whose heart has stopped. If we do manage to get patients back to life, there could be less incidents of neurological deficits, cognitive impairments, abnormalities.
It’s really a spectrum. One is pure cardiac and the other is neuroscience. Over all it should benefit everyone.
Next: Verifying Near-Death Experiences
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arodriguez661 10:34:26 PM Sep 28 2009
I commented on this article last year when I was an atheist. Since then I've become a born again Christian. I regret my past comment so I just wanted to come back here to correct my mistake. If you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you will be saved and he will change you into a new person with a new heart. That's why we call ourselves born again. It's something you have to experience to believe, but you have to believe first in order to experience the radical change. That's why it's called having faith, because it requires a leap of faith in order to become a true believer. Needless to say, I believe in the afterlife now.
mar3156 02:44:20 PM Sep 06 2009
Anyone in their right mind, with even a smiggin of logic, knows that there is no mind separate from the brain. If you are, other than Materialist, you are as crazy as Rene Descartes, a philosopher who believed the mind was all that existed, and also believe that there was an evil genius that was trying to convince people that the world that we live in was not the real world. On the otherhand, if you are religious you can justify anything.
garysheski 12:14:16 PM Sep 06 2009
George Burns said it best: "If you want to live forever, or be immortal, make it past age 100. Look at the record: throughout the history of humankind, very few people have EVER died beyond that age!" Think about that!
COMALite J 08:24:19 PM Apr 19 2009
One of the best hypotheses I've heard is that NDEs are actually memories of one of our very earliest conscious experiences, being relived as the oxygen loss causes neurons, including those that retrieve memories, to fire wildly and randomly. This is already known to cause the typical âmy whole life flashed before my eyesâ experience.What is among the earliest of our memories? Why, being born, of course!What is birth like, from the PoV of the fetus? Why, it travels effortlessly (on its part â er, somewhat less so on the motherâs, but we are talking about the fetal PoV here) down the cervical canal, which is similar to a pleasantly warm, dark tunnel. At the end, at the cervical opening, is the very first bright light the fetus sees (that of the hospital delivery room, home, or wherever), and an enormous figure often dressed in white (delivery doctor, midwife) is surrounded by this bright light, and stands there with arms and hands outstretched to receive the newborn baby into the
Geotoyou 05:19:45 PM Oct 30 2008
By Ashley Neglia Is the mind an extension of the brain or its own entity? ------------------------------------------------------------------Grandma used to have a saying about life and I never made the connection till I was in my late teens - early twenties. She used to say, It's all mind over matter son so be true to thyself". (Mind Over Matter, think about it.)
Dirockson 08:47:27 PM Oct 27 2008
Can't say never had an a near death experience ... almost loosing my child was close enough to death I ever want to be... I know as humans death is part of life .. I hope my death is peaceful sleep like my aunts go to sleep in your christmas pJ's and just die in your sleep no suffering anymore .....
GodzCloud 06:08:08 PM Oct 22 2008
just stfu all of u who the **** cares anyways just live ur life die happy wan what comes next comes next
arodriguez661 10:53:27 PM Sep 29 2008
This type of debate is simply moronic. No one knows what causes a near death experience or if there is even any significance to having one. You will never know if your "soul" is immortal until you die. Accept that fact and live your life as if you only have one. Plus an afterlife could be considered a negative experience depending on the circumstances. Think about it. Personally, I see advantages to both possibilities. For instance, if I came back to a world such as this or one in worse condition than our current system, then I think eternal rest would be a good thing.
Kirkwhisper 09:57:22 PM Sep 29 2008
"pure nonsense and superstition."That position is pure idiocy and bigotry. It is a position that must assume that every single person who has had a near death or death/like experience that can verify the fact that they observed things from the spirit realm is lying. No way. I know people personally who have had such experiences and I believe them because of the credibility they have in all other things. I do not believe the skepticism of atheists and/or agnostics who have had no such experiences.
