“Clinically dead” generally means that the heart has stopped. If nothing intervenes, a human being will die.
However, many medical patients today are revived by emergency procedures and their recalled experiences during this period are a natural topic of interest.
At the Daily Mail, science and technology editor Stacy Liberatore reports on a study that explored consciousness after the heart stops:
More than 140 patients, who were at risk of cardiac arrest, across 13 hospitals in the UK and Spain, volunteered for an experiment that would see music played through a speaker during the first two minutes of resuscitation if their hearts stopped.
After recovering, the survivors completed a ten-item memory test that mixed sounds played during resuscitation with others that had not been played.
The group hearing nature sounds, including rain and birdsong, and one hearing newly created melodies scored above chance, while a third group hearing the same melodies under different experimental conditions performed around guessing level.
“Life after death mystery deepens as scientists find signs of consciousness in ‘clinically dead’ patients,” October 31, 2026
The fact that a significant number of the participants scored above chance under certain conditions implies consciousness after heart stoppage. The experiment should be repeated, where possible.
The researchers think that quantum principles may be at work.
From the Abstract to the open-access paper at a Cell: journal:
If consciousness can operate under quantum principles, then the boundaries between life, death, and cognition are far more permeable than current science allows. In the first large-scale, randomized, double-blind, multicenter trial to test this possibility, conducted across 13 hospitals in the UK and Spain, we investigated whether the human mind can access information during clinical death—but only when exposed to auditory stimuli governed by quantum entanglement…
These findings compel a radical rethinking of clinical death: consciousness may persist—quantum bound, detectable, and not yet defeated.
Escolà-Gascón Á, Drinkwater K, Denovan A … Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death The Innovation, 2026; 7
Of course, these experiments are not straightforward because the researchers need to find people at risk of death (not that the researchers necessarily put it that way, of course), to participate, and then to undergo tests — if they survive.
But it is worth looking into, keeping an open mind, as always.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I are currently working on a book on the science evidence available so far on near-death experiences. There is a very good case for the hypothesis that the immaterial part of the human mind — reason and moral choice — survive death. We also went into that, to some extent, in The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 3, 2025).
Stay tuned. It stays interesting.