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He could see a nurse and doctor, a bald, “chunky fella” dressed in blue hospital scrubs. He watched as they frantically worked on his body, which was remarkable, considering he was, essentially, dead.

The man had suffered a cardiac arrest. Normally there is no measurable, meaningful brain activity after the heart stops beating. Within two to 20 seconds the brain “flatlines.”

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But the man would later tell researchers that he could see an unfamiliar woman beckoning from a corner up in the ceiling. “I can’t get up there,” he remembered thinking to himself, and then the next second, “I was up there, looking down at me.”

He said he saw his blood pressure being taken, and a doctor putting something down his throat. He saw a nurse pumping on his chest. He accurately and vividly described the people, sounds and events of his “resurrection.”

Photo by Cornelia Li for National Post

Dr. Sam Parnia estimates the man experienced conscious awareness for three to five minutes in the absence of detectable brain activity, a time, he has said, “when no human experience should be happening whatsoever.”