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When we die, our whole life passes before our eyes in an instant. Will the claim, for years regarded as the invention of clinical-death survivors, finally gain scientific confirmation? Everything points to this: for the first time researchers were able to record the brain waves of a dying person in great detail. The case report was published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
People who "looked death in the face" often described their experiences in a surprisingly similar way: as a feeling of peace accompanied by vivid memories of a lifetime. They also saw a bright light and had a sense of being out of the body. However, researchers have so far been unable to confirm this due to the lack of sufficient data on the processes that take place in the brain at the time of death.
They recorded them only recently in an 87-year-old patient who underwent cardiac arrest after a traumatic subdural hematoma. Doctors monitored his condition, including using electroencephalography (EEG) to assess the bioelectrical activity of the brain. The patient's condition worsened and he died during the study. This unexpected death (and the patient's "do not resuscitate" status) allowed researchers to record the bioelectric activity of the dying person's brain and provided an unprecedented level of detail.
"We measured 900 seconds of brain activity at death and placed particular emphasis on investigating what happened 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating," explained Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, USA. "Just before and after the heart stopped beating, we saw changes in a certain band of neuronal oscillations, the so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others, such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations." - added the scientist.
Neural oscillations, better known as brain waves, are the collective electrical activity of neurons that occurs at different frequencies, and is associated with different states of consciousness and functions such as waking memory, perception, information processing, dream state, etc. Shortly after the patient is in cardiac arrest before death, activity testThe brain showed a relative increase in the power of the gamma band that interacted most with alpha waves - a pattern similar to what happens when we remember something.
"Given that the interconnection between alpha and gamma wave activity occurs during cognitive and memory recall processes in he althy people, such brain activity at the time of death may suggest that the dying person remembers what happened behind life "- say the researchers.
The authors point out a few caveats - first of all, that the patient's brain was injured and swollen, and the patient was receiving high doses of antiepileptic drugs. Also, there were no basic scans of this patient's brain taken while he was he althy, so brain activity could not be compared. However, by definition, it is impossible to access such data in he althy patients whose deaths cannot be predicted. Therefore, according to the researchers, obtaining recordings from the period just before death was possible only in a terminal patient. Despite these limitations, researchers point to a potential link between brain wave activity at the time of death and the experiences of clinical death survivors, and describe how their lives "flashed before their eyes."
"We can draw a conclusion from this research: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are willing to leave us permanently, their brains can recreate the best moments they have experienced in their lives." - summarizes Dr. Ajmal Zemmar