MORE: I rejected religion all my life. Then a mysterious illness left me begging to die
By CHRIS MELORE, US ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR
Published: 00:28 EST, 13 February 2026 | Updated: 00:28 EST, 13 February 2026
The final words many people hear when they die may be the most traumatic of all, as a top critical care doctor has revealed the brain remains active after the heart stops.
In those minutes after physicians stop CPR, Dr Sam Parnia said the deceased can likely still hear doctors announcing their time of death before all life fades away.
Parnia, the director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone School of Medicine in New York, has not only studied what happens to the human brain when you die, but has also spoken to patients who survived near-death experiences.
That research revealed many occurrences where patients who were clinically dead, noted as when the heart stops beating, who were later revived and described conversations and events taking place in their room with remarkable accuracy.
The reason doctors only look at the heart when determining the time of death is because that’s the moment when blood flow to the brain stops.
However, a study led by Parnia in 2023 discovered spikes in brain waves associated with higher cognitive function up to an hour into CPR.
This means the brain can ‘wake up’ and start working again, in a way that looks a lot like normal thinking and awareness, even while doctors are still performing CPR on a stopped heart.
Unique brain patterns examined on electroencephalograms (EEGs) during near-death experiences appeared to provide evidence that patients were really in a dream-like consciousness that left them aware enough to keep hearing people speak.
Dr Sam Parnia at NYU hospital has said the final words a person is likely to hear is their own time of death being announced
‘Although doctors have long thought that the brain suffers permanent damage about 10 minutes after the heart stops supplying it with oxygen, our work found that the brain can show signs of electrical recovery long into ongoing CPR,’ Parnia said in a statement.
Parnia’s study, called AWARE-II, specifically looked into what happens to people’s brains and minds during cardiac arrest at 25 hospitals across the US and UK.
Researchers monitored patients in real time with EEGs to track electrical activity, measuring oxygen levels in the brain, and interviewing survivors about what they remembered while being declared clinically dead.
From 2017 to 2020, the team examined 567 people who had in-hospital cardiac arrests and received CPR to try to bring them back from the dead.
Those observations revealed one in five survivors reported clear, dream-like experiences during their death, such as feeling detached from their body, seeing events in the room, or having memories of their entire life flash in front of them.
Moreover, the study in the journal Resuscitation uncovered spikes in brain waves, including gamma, alpha, and beta waves, which are linked to thinking, memory, and awareness, showing up 35 to 60 minutes after a person’s heart stopped.
Once blood stopped flowing to the brain, Parnia found the brain cells lose oxygen quickly, but instead of going completely quiet, they can fire off strong signals and connect in new ways for a short time.
This burst of brain activity is thought to trigger a hyper-alert state, like a super-focused mode, which might explain why some people keep hearing the world around them even as the rest of their body has shut down.
Dr Sam Parnia (Pictured) conducted a study in 2023 that found brain activity long after the heart stops beating, known as clinical death
Along with still being ‘alive’ in the real world and able to hear the doctor’s terrifying comments, Parnia previously explained how this energy burst in the brain also allows people to access everything in their mind all at one time.
‘As the brain shuts down, because of a lack of blood flow in death, the normal breaking systems in the brain are removed, known as disinhibition,’ Parnia explained in 2023.
‘This enables people to have access to their entire consciousness. All their thoughts, memories, all their emotional states, everything that they’ve ever done, which they relive through the perspective of morality and ethics.’
Overall, Parnia explained that the revelation of people continuing to live beyond the traditional point of death opens up new areas of study for patient care, helping doctors design new ways to restart the heart or prevent brain injuries during cardiac arrest.
For example, better techniques or medicines could protect the brain while CPR is happening.
The findings may also impact organ donation, as understanding how long the brain really stays alive may affect decisions about harvesting organs too soon.