Back From the Dead

Certainly, people do not form memories while they're in a coma. Exactly one year before Bondar had his heart attack, Brian Duffield, then 40, a salesman in Tucson, collapsed in the shower after a swim. Luckily for him, he was on the campus of the University of Arizona, whose hospital uses a cooling protocol similar to Penn's. "I was there one minute and the next thing I know, it's a few days later and people are telling me I was dead and came back," says Duffield. But Duffield's memory and intellect and personality all returned intact from his brush with death, as did Bondar's. This is, on some level, deeply mysterious. We experience consciousness embedded in time, a succession of mental states continually re-created in our brains, even during sleep. But when the brain shuts down, where does the mind go?

That is the crux of one of the oldest debates in philosophy. The materialist view is that Bondar's memories resided in the physical state of the cells and synapses of his brain, a state that is preserved for some period after the heart stops beating. Becker has pronounced perhaps a thousand deaths in his career, but often with the feeling that—despite the lack of pulse, breathing or discernible brain function—something vital remains in the body on the bed. He felt it most strongly when his own father died of cardiac arrest at the very hospital where Becker was working in 1993. When Becker saw him, he was already dead, but something seemed preserved. "I just had the sense he wasn't really dead yet," Becker says. "He was dead. He had been pronounced. But he hadn't left."

This is the belief motivating people who pay to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen after their deaths, in the hope that they can someday be thawed and restored to life. The Alcor Foundation, in Scottsdale, Ariz., has signed up about 825 prospective patients, and has preserved 76 of them, including Ted Williams. These aren't all whole bodies; some people opt for just their heads, which, apart from being cheaper, freeze faster than an entire body, reducing the danger of frost damage to the cells. Of course, we are a long way from knowing how to reanimate a frozen body, let alone just a head. One possibility, according to Tanya Jones, chief operating officer of Alcor, is to take a cell from the head and clone a new body to attach it to. The other is to scan the entire three-dimensional molecular array of the brain into a computer which could hypothetically reconstitute the mind, either as a physical entity or a disembodied intelligence in cyberspace. This, obviously, is not for the impatient. The physicist Ralph Merkle, an Alcor board member, has used this idea to popularize a fourth definition of death: "information-theoretic" death, the point at which the brain has succumbed to the pull of entropy and the mind can no longer be reconstituted. Only then, he says, are you really and truly dead.

But there's another answer to the question of where Bondar's mind was during the last week of May. This is the view that the mind is more than the sum of the parts of the brain, and can exist outside it. "We still have no idea how brain cells generate something as abstract as a thought," says Dr. Sam Parnia, a British pulmonologist and a fellow at Weill Cornell Medical College. "If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, it can't think. Why should two brain cells think? Or 2 million?" The evidence that the mind transcends the brain is said to come from near-death experiences, the powerful sensation of well-being that has been described by people like Anthony Kimbrough, a Tennessee real-estate agent who suffered a massive coronary in 2005 at the age of 44. Dying on the table in the cath lab during angioplasty, he sensed the room going dark, then lighter, and "all of a sudden I could breathe. I wasn't in pain. I felt the best I ever felt in my life. I remember looking at the nurses' faces and thinking, 'Folks, if you knew how great this is, you wouldn't be worried about dying'." Kimbrough had the odd sensation of being able to see everything in his room at once, and even into the next room. He is one of about 1,200 people who have registered their experiences with a radiation oncologist named Dr. Jeffrey Long, who established the Near Death Experience Research Foundation in 1998 to investigate the mystery of how unconscious people can form conscious memories.

That's also what motivates Parnia, who has begun a study of near-death experiences in four hospitals in Britain, aiming for 30 by the year-end. The study will test the frequently reported sensation of looking down on one's body from above, by putting random objects on high shelves above the beds of patients who are likely to die. If they later claim to have been floating near the ceiling, he plans to ask them what they saw. Parnia insists he's not interested in validating anyone's religious beliefs; his idea is that death can be studied by scientists, as well as theologians.

As for Bondar, his mind stayed put during his ordeal, which ended when he went home with Monica on June 1, nine days after he died. Gerstenfeld had given him an implantable defibrillator, cleared his blocked artery and inserted a stent to keep it open. "He came back fully intact," says Gerstenfeld. "He was dead, if only for a few minutes. But it could have been much worse. He could have been dead-dead."