(continuing from the last comment because it was too long)

In a recent study, where cardiac-arrest patients were followed for a period of four years, both in the UK and the US, reported that 40% of the patients who were declared "legally dead," for a period of time, described a state of being aware for a period that goes on significantly longer than the time frame that death actually occurs.

So, this is one study and relies on subjective opinions of someone who was in an unconscious or semi conscious state. Let me tell you that I've been unconscious quite a few times in my life and your entire concept of reality and time is completely whacked. Last time I had severe trauma to the head in an accident and didn't become conscious from my perspective for 40 minutes. However people around me said I'd been lucid and talking to them for a long time before that, in fact most of the time. Similarly there are areas of the brain that when not functioning can literally lead someone to have an "out of the body experience". That part of the brain helps you determine from the sensory inputs where you are spatially - if disabled, which can be done experimentally - subjects report being outside of their body, above their body, in another room even. These are not magical things, but easily explained. Have you ever looked at something and being confused about distance? Tried driving with one eye closed so you don't have depth perception? Experience optical illusions or discomfort and confusion due to stroboscopic lighting? Yes, your brain can play amazing tricks on you so this one study you cite - neither amazes or surprises me.

You should also look into the physiological effects and experiences that free divers have, where they go without oxygen for way more minutes than the average person does before they experience brain death. And yet they live. Well usually. Sometimes they come so close they don't make it back. Tunnel vision, hallucinations, confusion are all things they experience on a regular basis. Nothing magical or supernatural. What kills one person may be easily achievable for another. Ditto for people left on the slab with apparently no vital signs but "come back to life" later. Medicine and biology is a very inexact science and it is no surprise that people studying statistics will often spend a lot of time looking at medical experiment data trying to draw conclusions.

Regardless I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here - are you trying to say one study at Southampton University proves that the soul lives after we are dead? If that is true then why aren't people waking up while waiting to be cremated? Why aren't we getting people rising from the grave all the time? Has there ever been a time when someone was demonstrably dead and came back to life? That university where they leave bodies out to decay - did they ever lose any that wandered off?

Or could it really be that the definition of "dead" in medicine is very error prone and this one study was experimentally flawed as so many are - which is why science requires for rigorous standards in experiments, especially medical ones. I'm sure you have read of many a tale of a person who was paralyzed at some level, breathing extremely shallowly with a very faint heartbeat and did not respond to any of the standard tests of being alive. However they were still conscious enough to realize they were being declared dead and perhaps dragged off to a morgue. Others have barely managed to avoid being cut open for transplant prep when someone noticed faint signs of life. Kids have been tossed into icy water and due to vestigial diving reflex managed to survive very long periods without breathing and oxygen before being rescued and resuscitated. If you take a CPR course you'll know that it very rarely works, even when done by trained professionals. However in the rare occasion it does you're going to feel like it was a miracle - and so will the person saved. However really it is just mostly luck and probabilities. Right person, right time, right treatment, right response... but like the single number on the roulette table, once in a while you'll strike it lucky and think oh lordy, it's a miracle! Nope, just dumb luck and your biased pattern matching, just like every "answered prayer" ever.