TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2011

STOCKHOLM    MAY 1-8, 2011   AULA MAGNA HALL

Plenary 14,

Saturday, May 7   11:10 to 1:20 pm

End of life brain activity
Chawla L, GWU, Surges of Electroencephalogram Activity at the Time of Death. A Case Series.

Fenwick P. London, Death and the Loosening of Consciousness

LAKMIR S. CHAWLA                                        PETER FENWICK                                                 

George Washington U                                     London                                                                  

Lakhmir S. Chawla currently serves as an Associate Professor of Medicine; he has dual appointments in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and in the Division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension at the George Washington University Medical Center. He has been with George Washington University Medical Center since 1995. Dr. Chawla is board certified in Critical Care Medicine and Nephrology. He is an active investigator in the field of Acute Kidney Injury, particularly in the area of inflammation and AKI, AKI biomarkers, AKI risk prediction, and AKI therapeutics.  In addition, Dr. Chawla has an interest in EEG activity in critically ill patients.

Peter Fenwick is Consultant Neuropsychiatrist emeritus to the Epilepsy Unit at the Maudsley Hospital, which he ran for twenty years.  He is presently appointed as a Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry and Southampton University, and Honorary Consultant Clinical  Neurophysiologist at Broadmoor Hospital. Over the last ten years he has spent several months a year working in the field of magnetoencephalography in a neuroscience research laboratory in Japan. Dr Fenwick has a long standing interest in brain function and the problem of consciousness and has published a large number of research papers related to altered states of consciousness, and abnormalities of consciousness and behaviour. He  has researched into meditation and continues to be interested in the relationship between meditative states. One of his main interests for some years has been near death experiences and the dying process, and he is at present carrying out a research project in hospices in the UK, Holland and Japan into the experiences reported by the dying and their carers around the time of death. He has co-authored several books with his wife, most recently The Art of Dying.  Other titles are a study of near death experiences, “The Truth in the Light”,  and of dreams “The Hidden Door.”