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Dying seemed like such an important area of research – we all do it, after all – that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death.[qh]
死亡似乎是一个非常重要的研究领域——毕竟我们都会经历死亡——所以博尔吉金认为其他科学家已经对死亡过程中大脑发生的事情有了深入的了解。[qh]
But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment.[qh]
但当她查阅科学文献时，她发现几乎没有什么启示。[qh]
“To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently.[qh]
“死亡是生命中如此重要的一部分，”她最近告诉我。[qh]
“But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.”[qh]
“但是，我们对垂死的大脑几乎一无所知。”[qh]
So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.[qh]
因此，她决定返回去，弄清楚那些在密歇根大学神经重症监护病房去世的人的大脑内部发生了什么。[qh]
Among them was Patient One.[qh]
其中有一位是一号病人。[qh]
At the time Borjigin began her research into Patient One, the scientific understanding of death had reached an impasse.[qh]
当时，博尔吉金开始研究一号病人，科学界对死亡的理解陷入了僵局。[qh]
Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died.[qh]
自20世纪60年代以来，复苏技术的进步帮助挽救了成千上万人的生命，否则他们可能已经死亡。[qh]
About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies.[qh]
其中，大约10%或20%的人带来了他们濒死体验的故事，在这些故事中，他们感觉自己的灵魂或自我离开了他们的身体。[qh]
A handful of those patients even claimed to witness, from above, doctors' attempts to resuscitate them.[qh]
其中有少数病人甚至宣称，他们从上方看到了医生试图复苏他们的过程。[qh]
According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death.[qh]
根据几项国际调查和研究，每10个人中就有1个人声称有过涉及心脏骤停的濒死体验，或在可能接近死亡的情况下有过类似的经历。[qh]
That's roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.[qh]
这大约是全球 8 亿人，他们可能已经涉足了来世。[qh]
As remarkable as these near-death experiences sounded, they were consistent enough that some scientists began to believe there was truth to them: maybe people really did have minds or souls that existed separately from their living bodies.[qh]
这些濒死体验听起来令人惊叹，而且它们足够一致，以至于一些科学家开始相信其中有真相：也许人们真的有独立于他们身体而存在的思想或灵魂。[qh]
In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.[qh]
20世纪70年代，北美和欧洲的一个由心脏病专家、精神病学家、医学社会学家和社会心理学家组成的小型网络开始调查，濒死体验是否证明死亡并非生命的终结，以及意识是否可以独立于大脑而存在。[qh]
The field of near-death studies was born.[qh]
濒死研究领域就此诞生。[qh]
Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences.[qh]
在接下来的 30 年里，研究人员收集了成千上万例有濒死体验的人的案例报告。[qh]
Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased.[qh]
同时，新技术和新方法正在帮助医生，使越来越多的人苏醒过来，而在历史早期，这些人几乎肯定会永久地死亡。[qh]
“We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?”[qh]
“我们现在正处于这样一个时刻，我们既有工具又有方法来科学地回答一个古老的问题：当我们死亡时会发生什么？”[qh]
wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006.[qh]
这是萨姆·帕尼亚在 2006 年写的，他是一位成就卓著的复苏专家，也是世界上研究濒死体验的顶尖专家之一。”[qh]
Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.[qh]
帕尼亚本人正在设计一项国际研究，以测试患者在临床死亡后是否仍有意识。[qh]
