How important is time?

Is it worth the wait to tell your crush that you like him/her? Is there a right time to tell your parents how much you love them? How hard should a grandparent fight with time to see his/her grandchild? Or is the value of time equivalent to the life of a patient diagnosed with cancer?

Enveloped with multiple things to multi task in our daily lives, we notice how fast time flies. But little do we wonder what is the speed of time? Or can time be measured with more factors the way force or velocity is measured? Is time the ultimate dimension that is always independent? Well, a person who is approaching his/her death probably would have thought about ‘time’ more than anyone else.

This realization hit me when I was in the BU Shuttle on my way to class on a Friday afternoon. I was running late and wished for the time to pass slowly. While on the other hand I wished for my day to end fast as I couldn’t wait to jump onto my bed for a nice nap. With nothing to do in the bus, I began contemplating my situation, due to my habit of over-analyzing every situation. In a span of a minute, I phased out and felt situated in a hospital that I used to volunteer at, in Abu Dhabi. Several faces of children diagnosed with chronic diseases, who I used to play with in the hospital ran across my mind. I was shaken by the realization that for these kids and parents every moment was uncertain. They either wished to travel back in time and for the time to halt. They would have prayed several times a day to spend more time in their body and here, I was hoping for rapid alterations in time to suit my convenience. But while I had the strength to continue my daily life without these alterations, these kids were at high risk of losing their strength. At this point I couldn’t differentiate between what was right or wrong. I didn’t know whether it was worth it to chase my dreams miles away from my parents and my grandparents or was it worth the effort to make it in time for my class. These are the kind of questions that some times keep us up at night. But these are also the kind of questions that also don’t have definite answers. However, whether we tirelessly seek answers to such questions or give it our cursory glance, there is some one who is hanging on the other side of the rope of time. His/her life is only a matter of time…

DOES HEAVEN REALLY EXIST?

“Standing at the coastline witnessing the beautiful purple mountains standing upright against the swift blue – grey clouds adorning the pinkish – orange sky.  What an ideal heavenly sight! But does paradise really exist?

A neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, a victim of a rare bacterial meningitis, says that he has been to paradise. Eben Alexander III is an American neurosurgeon and the author of the best seller “ Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into Afterlife” in which he describes his 2008 near death experience and asserts that science can and will determine that heaven really does exist.

 In November 2008, the diagnosed bacterial disease was shutting down the University of Virginia’s neurosurgeon’s neocortex – the part of the brain that deals with sensory perception and conscious thought. He laid in coma for 7- days during which he journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension he had never dreamt existed.

There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep, black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings… quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet.”

But was this a reality or just a lucid dream, a collection of images supplied by our sub conscience mind. But Eben Alexande isn’t the only one who encountered such an experience. There are several people on this planet who were saved from the mouth of death and have witnessed near death experiences.

Most of them report a sense of peace and painlessness, and a vision of bright light. Other report feelings or visions associated with their cultural beliefs. There experiences are shared on the official website http://www.nderf.org

So what is exactly happening? There is considerable controversy on this. Researchers at the university of Michigan have conducted research on the near death experiences of patients suffering from a cardiac arrest. They have found that there is a surge of electrical activity in the brain at the time of cardiac arrest. This unusual activity was recorded for the first time by the scientists in rats which were undergoing a stimulated cardiac arrest.

Led by author Jimo Borjigin, associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School the study shows that shortly after clinical death, in which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception.  These visions and perceptions have been called “realer than real,” according to previous research, but it remains unclear whether the brain is capable of such activity after cardiac arrest.

The possibility that arises is that if these experiences are manifestations of brain activities, then it should be possible for researchers to detect such neural signals.

Researchers analyzed the recordings of brain activity called electroencephalograms (EEGs) from nine anesthetized rats undergoing experimentally induced cardiac arrest.

Within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all of the rats displayed a widespread, transient surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with a highly aroused brain. Nearly identical patterns in the dying brains of rats undergoing asphyxiation were also observed. These data confirmed the earlier possibility.

In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death.

Not only in the case of cardiac arrest, the generation of these neural signals can occur in the near death from other reasons too.

From the religious point of view heaven is center for afterlife, but scientifically it is the manifestation of neural activity.

THE MAIN QUESTION IS: WHICH STORY DO WE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE?