After countless accounts of near-death experiences, dating as far back as ancient Greece, science is now taking serious steps forward to explore the nature of the phenomenon. A new project aims to determine whether the experience is a physiological event or evidence that the human consciousness is far more complicated than we ever believed.
Years ago, I think it was in Sweden, experiments were conducted on people just after they died: the thrust was to explore whether or not people had a 'soul' that left the body following physiological cessation. Each patient's hospital bed was mounted on very delicate scales (isolated from exterior vibration) and sealed with a plastic barrier to prevent moisture from escaping the body and effecting the scales just following death. All of the patients showed a loss of a set amount--some fractions of a gram--of weight which did not deviate one from the other among them in any degree within seconds following their deaths.
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