"THE last thing I remembered was being rushed to the hospital. Then I passed out.When I came to I was standing next to my bed and, being a nurse, I started checking temperature and blood pressure. It was only after a while that I noticed I was looking at myself.”

These are the chilling words of former Southampton nurse Heather Sloan, who, after suffering an internal bleed, ended up on the other side of the operating table as a patient.

As she lay there, Mrs Sloan felt herself leaving her body and heading towards a light where hundreds of people were waiting.

“I became aware of my critical situation while going through my life review.

“When I asked the people why I was in this place I was told about losing my baby.

“I didn’t even realise I was pregnant,” she recalled.

“In fact, I had an opportunity to meet this baby before being allowed to return to my physical self. Eventually I felt like I was allowed to return and beganmaking my way back to my body.”

The next thing she remembered was being conscious and surrounded by nurses.

They told her she’d lost her baby, but of course she already knew.

The following day, Mrs Sloan was told she’d had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, when the pregnancy implants outside womb, and it had caused a significant haemorrhage.

The near-death experience left her in no doubt there is life beyond death.

Conventional science says when a heart stops beating and the patient stops breathing, their brain shuts down and consciousness disappears.

But a new study being led by the University of Southampton will test a different theory: that when the brain stops functioning, the mind can continue to exist.

AWARE – awareness during resuscitation – is the world’s largest ever study of neardeath experiences and will seek to answer one of the great mysteries of life: is the mind separate from the brain? If so, is that proof we have a soul?

“It happened as far as I am concerned, and anyone who has had the same experience will say the same,” Mrs Sloan attested.

Heart attack survivors at Southampton General Hospital are central to the groundbreaking research.

Patients will be asked to describe their experience of dying and being brought back to life. The study will monitor brain activity during cardiac arrest and test the validity of near-death and out-of-body experiences.

The implications for medical science – and possibly our outlook on life – could be monumental, according to Katie Baker, a resuscitation officer at Southampton General Hospital.

“It would be astounding and maybe scary. It is hard to say just what the implication might be,” she said of finding evidence that out-of-body experiences are more than just a trick of the mind.

“What we are trying to do is, for the first time in the world, get some evidence so that even the most hardcore cynic would have to admit there’s something in this.”

Doctors place random photos, drawings and images on shelves higher than the beds of patients likely to suffer a cardiac arrest.

The images are positioned so that they will only be visible if the flatliners are looking down from the ceiling.

The images will be confidential, change routinely and even hospital staff are banned from taking a peek. Furthermore, special equipment will be brought in to monitor brain activity, in much the same way a heart monitor operates.

“If somebody did have an out-of-body experience, floated up, looked down and described afterwards one of these images it would freak everybody out, because it would be the first time there is clearly something going on here,” Ms Baker said.

“It will be fascinating, because if a brain is at a complete standstill during cardiac arrest, and they then describe some experiences that they had, it might suggest that the mind is independent of the brain.”

The most common explanations are that the patient is imagining things because they’ve had had too much or too little oxygen, a change of chemicals in the brain or that they opened their eyes while being revived.

Ms Baker said doctors and nurses often become cynical of patient’s stories of “seeing the light” or “leaving their body”, but some were in such detail they couldn’t be ignored.

“When you’ve been working in this profession for a while you become a bit cynical, but I had one patient whose experience really was creepy,” she said.

“He had an out-of-body experience in which he floated over to ‘minors’ (a different area within A&E), and then described seeing a nurse, who was a friend of mine, in excellent detail and then went back into his body.”

The study is spearheaded by Dr Sam Parnia, a former University of Southampton lecturer now based in New York, who has enlisted 25 hospitals across the world to interview at least 1,500 survivors.

During a cardiac arrest, Parnia said there are three criteria of death; heart stops beating, lungs stop working and the brain shuts down.

Now science can bring people back to life – the hospital’s resuscitation team is ten per cent more likely to bring a flatliner back than the national average – Dr Parnia wants to understand what happens to the mind during this period of death.

“A proportion who have gone through death and been brought back again have reported being able to see and hear things exactly as they happened while they were being resuscitated.

They have described in detail how a doctor knocked over a bucket of instruments, for example,” Dr Parnia said.

“Around 90 per cent of people do not remember having a near-death experience; the remaining ten per cent do. A lot of what they say is subjective – a colour or a light, or a relative, which is interesting but isn’t something we can test.We’re looking for people who remember.”

The study has been running since early summer and has proved laborious, considering 90 per cent of cardiac arrest victims die, only ten per cent of survivors are likely to have a near-death experience and just two per cent of those have an out-ofbody experience.

But it could take just one survivor to change our outlook on life – and death – forever.