in the last hundred years.

I'm wondering what happens when we die.

Alex: So, I have been on a journey

to try to answer that one impossible question,

and it's taken me to a lot of interesting places.

Questions drive our show,

and this one comes from a YouTube viewer from Norway.

- Woman: Do you hear me? - Yeah, you sound great.

About your question--

What is that one question that everyone wants to know

but no one has the answer to?

I've lost a lot of people.

Someone I know really closely

who's been like a mother figure to me

just got terminal cancer,

and she has, like, a couple weeks left now.

I don't wanna sit here and think that they just die sadly

and fall into emptiness.

I'm super terrified of dying.

So, I'm not trying to prove the afterlife. That's unknowable.

But what if modern science could reveal what we'll experience

in the final moments of our lives?

( music playing )

More people are searching for what happens at the end of our lives,

so we're gonna figure that out.

You're gonna figure out what happens when we die?

Uh, I already have.

When Helle brought this question to me, I started digging,

and one thing that kept popping up was this video on a dog

that was brought back to life.

In 1926, a scientist came up with an experiment

that would redefine the way we would interpret the process of dying.

Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko drained dogs of blood,

and they died while connected

to his new machine the autojektor.

They stopped breathing and then their heartbeat ended.

They were believed to be completely dead.

Then the doctors waited.

After ten minutes without a heartbeat or breathing,

the autojektor cycled their bodies

with re-oxygenated arterial blood

and then the dogs came back to life.

And over time, they made a full recovery.

The dog experiment shows us that death was not just a moment in time,

but it was a long process.

So, that raised the question, if death is a process,

at what point do we truly die?

In the case of the dog,

that dog was actually never dead at all.

He had never died.

- What was he? - Allow me to explain.

That's a transition.

So what I have here are some custom

"Glad You Asked" tarot cards.

- Okay. - I picked these

because we tend to search for answers in the supernatural,

but there's still so much to be learned from science.

For most of human existence, life was thought to reside in two organs.

You had the heart and you had the lungs.

Do you have any idea why?

Those seem to be the ways that we can tell

if someone is dead from the outside--

- if they're breathing, if you can feel their heartbeat. - Exactly.

Alex: For thousands of years, we considered somebody dead

if they had no pulse and they weren't breathing.

But these signs can be misleading,

as people can actually recover from both.

This lead to fears of being buried alive.

Jean Jacques Winslow, a medical expert of his time,

stated that the safest way to define death

was putrefaction of the body, or decomposition.

But we still relied on that heart-lung definition.

Without signs of either, you're considered clinically dead.

In the last hundred years, that started to change.

In the '30s and '40s, two new machines

were commonly used to extend life.

We got the defibrillator that could restart the heart,

and the iron lung, followed by the respirator,

that could pump the lungs with air.

At around the same time,

we used another machine, the EEG,

to study electrical signals in the brain.

The brain will flatline within two to 20 seconds on an EEG

once the heart stops beating.

Alex: So, if each of these organs was not required

to be working all the time for you to be alive,

maybe we have to start thinking about death differently.

In 1978, President Carter mandated a commission

to study and define death.

He hoped to find a modern definition

which took into account recent medical advances.

In 1981, they published their report, "Defining Death."

This lead to the act that hospitals today use,

making the old definition of death obsolete.

The focus shifted over to this-- the brain.

This became the final indicator of whether you were alive or dead.

Now, there are levels to this--

the higher and the lower brain.

Most medical experts today say

that once you lose higher level brain functionality,

which is where logical thinking and personality reside,

you are considered dead.

You are dead even if

some of the lower level brain functions,

those controlled by the brain stem like breathing,

still persist.

So you can be brain dead, but still be breathing,

and have a heartbeat-- everything.

Totally. And that gets into kind of murky territory with how we define dead.

So, to answer what happens when we die,

we have to focus on one thing,

getting as close as possible to the final moments of life

to see what we feel and experience in those moments.

- To here. - The near-death experience.

( music playing )

So I started researching NDEs.

They're in Medieval accounts

and as far back as the writings of Plato.

They're in the artwork of Bosch from 500 years ago.

They're seeing a bright light.

They're going through a tunnel.

They're hearing voices and communicating with the dead.

To help go through the research,

I'm getting Joss to help me dive in.

Hey, Joss.

- I need your help. - Okay.

So I've been looking into near-death experiences.

Maybe there's a medical reason

- why these things are happening. - Mm-hmm.

So, just kind of survey whatever research is out there

- on how legit these experiences are. - Yeah.

Alex: While Joss is looking at NDE experiments,

I'm getting some caffeine and researching the history,

the controversies, and cultural impact of near-death experiences.

First, history.

1975, Dr. Raymond Moody publishes a book,

"Life After Life."

He coins the phrase "near-death experience."

Over the next two decades,

he's established as the preeminent expert on NDEs.

He proclaims the transformative effects of NDEs

and becomes the subject of this 1992 documentary.

Once they come back,

they tell us that they're totally transformed

and they have no more doubt whatsoever.

It's engrained into the public consciousness.

Even celebrities are saying they've had them.

It's just a lot of white light,

and you see people that have passed on and--

When you're in a coma for eight to ten days,

you're basically knocking on the door.

I was talking to my dad.

I sort of floated into this tunnel.

YouTube data shared with us

indicated that between 2017 and 2018,

views on videos related to death increased by 40%.

So clearly a lot of people have questions about death,

and one of the phenomena they're looking at is near-death experiences.

All right, that's enough internet.

I need to find an actual experiencer and talk to them.

I'm on my way to meet with Tony Cicoria.

He's an orthopedic surgeon

who in 1994 was struck by lightning

and experienced an NDE.

But something weird happened to Tony.

Tony became obsessed with music

and started to play it all the time,

and today he is a renowned composer.

( playing piano )

Tony: It's 1994, I'm at a family gathering

and I tried to call my mom.

I took the phone away from my face.

I was gonna hang it back up,

and I heard this huge, loud crack.

And I saw this big flash of light come out of the phone

and hit me right in the face.

And it just threw me back like a ragdoll.

And I was confronted with myself

on the ground about ten feet away.

And, you know, the first thought

that popped into my head was, "Oh, ( bleep ), I'm dead!"

And I'm looking down at the ground

and I noticed that my legs were dissolving.

You're seeing your body on the ground.

- Yeah. - You're feeling yourself outside of your body,

but you still feel yourself walking and present.

Yeah. Yeah, that was really weird.

I was just a ball of energy.

And right about the time I realized

this is the greatest thing that could ever happen to anyone,

it was like somebody flipped a switch,

and, bam, I was back in that body.

And I was pissed.

Some circuits got fried, and some that got opened,

and I had access to parts of my brain

that I didn't know existed for me.

But then within a couple weeks, all of a sudden

I started to have this insatiable desire to hear piano music.

Being struck by lightning, having an NDE,

didn't give you instant super powers.

I wish it had given me super powers.

I was skeptical.

I was a scientist before I went into medicine.

I-- you know, I thought about things and, you know,

there has to be a structure to follow.

But I'm absolutely certain

that consciousness survives death

and that we keep going through the cycle.

It doesn't seem like you're afraid of dying today.

No. No.

And that's a blessing and a curse.

I think that there's a process that happens

as we approach death.

It's an incredible experience.

It's certainly not something to do

before it's time to do it,

but it also is something to not be afraid of.

Alex: That was great!

I'm about to speak with Dr. Pim van Lommel,

and he a scientist from the Netherlands

who's been tracking near-death experiences for years.

Alex: Hello, Dr. van Lommel.

Yes.

How would you define near-death experience?

I think there's a lot of studies out there

that have tried to prove that near-death experiences

and out-of-body experiences exist.

Have you heard of Dr. Parnia's AWARE study?

- So I asked you to look into this AWARE case. - Yes.

Joss: This was the largest scientific study

of near-death experiences.

I put a little model of their experimental method.

- You made this yourself? - Yeah, I spent a lot of time making this.

- Amazing. - You better like it.

So, this is a hospital room where patients were likely to experience cardiac arrest.

Medical professionals would be rushing in

and trying to resuscitate this person.

And in those rooms they installed a shelf

- near the ceiling - Oh.

and placed a picture on top of that shelf.

And the idea was that if someone was going through an out-of-body experience,

they often claim that they're looking at themselves from the top of the ceiling--

that they would be able to see this picture

and report back what they saw.

During this study period, around 2,000 patients

had cardiac arrests, but only one of them

was healthy enough to explain an out-of-body experience.

But they didn't have a shelf in his room!