"I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness. It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die"
That is quite a prediction, and quite a guess.
"One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians"
I know what it means in this context, but often in a general religious context "spiritualist" refers to a specific set of beliefs that are significantly different from those of evangelical Christians (or Christians in general for that matter).
"If the field of near-death studies is at the threshold of new discoveries about consciousness and death, it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest. Lance Becker has been a leader in resuscitation science for more than 30 years"
SO we have a greater volume of data, but if that data is just more of the same it is hard to see how it will lead to breakthroughs.
The one thing that we know that is different is that brain function can be restored after the brain essentially stops: it is not a dynamic system that loses stuff it if it does not keep running - its not keeping essential stuff in something analogous to RAM. It is not proof that there is anything beyond the brain (I happen to think there is, but its no scientifically proven by a long way).
The next scientist inspired by this chase, will flesh out the Epicurean claim "the soul dies with the body". He will find out exactly when and where consciousness dies with the body. And the next Dante will condemn him to Hell for it.
The way some men's eyes light up when they dream of understanding and capturing the soul, rings alarm bells. Wanting something you can't have is dangerous.
Here is the paper from the major researcher mentioned in the article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2216268120
Who thinks this? Nobody thinks this. Literally and actually, irrefutably, not a single healthcare professional educated in the last 50 years makes this argument.
I'm not even a healthcare professional I'm a healthcare amateur (volunteer EMT) and I have personally witnessed the "turbo-mode" the brain goes into as it desperately plays its last cards trying to keep itself alive. On multiple occasions.
It's called agonal breathing. Your heart stops, your brain senses this, and it starts sending out every electrical signal possible to get your muscles spasming in the right order to restart breathing. It never works, but the brain tries. We always slap on a mask, pump as much oxygen into them as possible and start breathing for them and doing chest compressions but it almost never works.
It can go on for a LONG time, not "moments".
Someone might be obviously and permanently dead, and been that way for a half hour, and then their brainstem will find one last bit of energy somewhere and command the diaphragm and accessory muscles to take a final agonal breath thus scaring the shit out of everyone.
The patient's body is dead, but their brain refuses to give up until it exhausts every single ATP molecule available to it, and then it too, finally, dies.
The brain freaking the fuck out as it suffocates, shutting down various parts of itself to conserve energy until all that's left is the brainstem sending out reflexive, often garbled, commands to organs no longer capable of responding until it too dies isn't sign of a "soul".