UK Television Documentary - "The Day I Died" - broadcast on BBC2 (February 5, 2003).

This documentary explored the theory that near-death experiences come from beyond the brain. The British scientists - Dr Sam Parnia and Dr Peter Fenwick - have made a thorough study of near-death experiences that give evidence that there are people operating in the invisible part of the universe.

Sam Parnia – The man who Could Bring you Back from the Dead - by Tim Adams - The Observer (April 6, 2013)

Soul-Searching Doctors Find Life After Death (The Sunday Telegraph, October 22, 2000)

Toward a science for death related phenomenon and consciousness - A lecture given by Peter Fenwick at the University of Stockholm

The Horizon Research Foundation

If the continuation of consciousness and the mind at a time when the clinical criteria of death have been met and the brain has ceased functioning can be proven through large scale, reproducible scientific studies, then this will have huge implications for society.

It would indicate that the mind/consciousness may be a scientific entity, which is as of yet undiscovered, but which is not produced by the brain and is hence a separate entity from it.

Conceptually this may be rather similar to the discovery of electromagnetic phenomenon in the 19th century or Quantum processes which could not have been reduced down to the science of their time, however they do exist and were eventually discovered many years after they were first proposed.

Not only do we now know that they exist but we currently use them in our daily lives for example when we watch television, or use the microwave oven. It may be that in the same manner, we cannot reduce mind/consciousness down to chemical processes occurring in the brain.

If proven it would also mean that the age-old philosophical concept of the 'soul' may be the same as the more modern concepts of mind/consciousness and it is this that appears to remain after death.