Journalist Alan Pearce said he never had any intention of writing a book on comas. Then, he told host Richard Syrett (Twitter), Covid happened. He and his wife and co-author Beverly, a former private investigator, were stuck at home. They were also seeing a lot of reports about people on incubators being placed in medically induced comas. Curious they began looking into it and found that the common practice, which according to Pearce’s research has been “an essential tool in critical care for the past 50 years,” was being, “massively overused.” But what started as an investigation into the impact of medically induced comas on patients and their recovery turned into something more when they began hearing the stories of what people experienced when in a coma – both the medically induced kind and those caused by accident or illness.

For instance, one of the individuals interviewed in the book, Nick, was placed into a medically induced coma for sepsis that developed from a bout of pneumonia. For the two weeks he was in that coma, Nick, “lived an entire life, minute by minute, with clear consciousness,” Pearce said. This included working a job. Getting married. Raising a family. Even fighting in a war. Eventually he became unwell and potentially had a heart attack in that other life, but when he woke up in the hospital – surrounded by people who were excited to see him – he was confused. He didn’t recognize them. He wanted to tell them they had the wrong room, but he had been on a ventilator for two weeks and couldn’t speak. Nick was surrounded by his friends, family, and fiancée, but he didn’t recognize any of them, and he longed for the wife and daughter he left behind.

While he did eventually regain his memories of his life before the coma, Pearce said that in many of these cases those memories are filtered through others. “What often happens is that memory is very, very patchy. So, what they do remember is what they’ve been told, as it were. They don’t have natural memories. They’ve been recreated, as it were, to fill in the blanks.” By contrast, his memories of that other family, his job, and his friends in the mid-century American Midwest, are still strong. Nick in this life runs a pizza restaurant. In the other life he had a completely different lifestyle. The other Nick was very good with his hands, “a mechanic, a top gardener, and all the rest,” as Pearce described it, and those skills have carried through. Before the coma Nick was not very handy. Now, he does his own car and home repairs, as well as helping out neighbors.

The old life still has an emotional hold on him too. “He told me that, in many ways, he had more in that life than he does in this life. He had great friends. He really enjoyed his job. And it’s just unbelievable that he finds himself in this world, having lost another world.” It’s a pattern Pearce found over and over in his work. One man remembered his life as an architect, with a wife and three children, and couldn’t recount the memories without breaking down in tears each time. “Here, he’s in this world, with a wife who he can’t explain to that he’s in love with this other person who, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.”

Other folks interviewed for the book had experiences of lingering near the afterlife, waiting to move on, or a sense of unity with the universe. While still others had nightmarish experiences, including some who continued to experience everything around them without being able to respond or interact.
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• Coma and Near-Death Experience


Rick to Alan Pearce
Coast listener here... please add me to your email list for updates, etc. Great interview, thanks. I'm in cryonics in Arizona, Alcor, so I'll be posting this to their blogs because a lot of the cryonics patients start in hospice and go down in induced coma to preserve brain tissue. Very interesting connection in my expert opinion having been a cryonics enthusiast since 1979, now 66 years old. I'm leaning more toward quantum physics and mind/body dualism than cryonics lately however. Still, relevent to the cryonics brain=mind "monists". Rick Potvin, PHoenix AZ.

Alan Pearce
Torick_potvin@yahoo.com
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Apr 7 at 2:54 AM
Hi Rick, that is fascinating what you say about cryonics and inducing coma towards the end. I would seriously wonder where patients are finding themselves.
Please do post on the blog. I’d be fascinated to hear the response. Perhaps you can keep me informed. What is the actual thinking behind inducing coma? You mention preserving brain tissue.
Thank you for getting in touch.
Very best wishes,
Alan

Hi Alan, in the interest of time, I'll refer you to their most popular blog-forum at this time here
https://groups.io/g/cryonet3

I'm using an older web browser so my posting feature does not work on my home-desktop-mac and I don't use a smart phone. I go the library weekly to access sites my desktop cannot where they have up-to-date browsers. You can create a request for an account if you have the inclination otherwise I'll go in and try to get some feedback over the next month or so and report back to you when I have something interesting happening there.

you
What is the actual thinking behind inducing coma? You mention preserving brain tissue.

me
It's a very hush hush action taken by insiders-- that is-- to actively process the actual dying part of things as a cryonics patient is "going down" in order to preserve brain-tissue in with as much integrated physical structural integrity as possible to maximize the change of future "reanimation" if and when the technology for that becomes available. This is, of course, the entire reason for cryonics. Cryonics assumes that memory and personalty are embedded in preservable brain structure on the molecular nano-scale level of 10*-9m.

The big problem is that facilitating the dying process is often regarded as murder, even in hospice but not if if it's kept quiet. "Stand-by teams" are employed in cryonics to be present 24/7 when patients "deanimate" with/without "deanimation assistance" and sometimes they wake up after officially declaration of death. The cryonics technical reports used to be detailed in the 1960's and 1970's but became increasingly thin with few details so that all of these interesting matters are top secret now. I was the person who discovered that Ted Williams, the famous baseball hero, became a "neuro" patient in 2002 that gained national attention but having been to Alcor board meetings, I was only able to determine that through a process of inference & deduction.

Alcor is in Scottsdale about 1/2 hr from where I live because I had originally intended to eventually be an easily preservable patient living nearby. It’s actually on “Acoma” St. in Scottsdale AZ. http://www.alcor.org