![]() When taken off their ventilators, two of the four patients - a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman - saw increases in their heart rates as well as surges of brain waves in the gamma frequency - the fastest such brain activity, which is associated with consciousness.Įarlier studies - including a prominent paper published in 2022 about an 87-year-old man who died from a fall - have also found spikes in gamma waves in some people near the point of death. The team looked back at the records of four patients who died from cardiac arrest while on electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring.Īll four fell into comas and were removed from life support after it was determined they were beyond medical help. While not the first study of its kind, what sets the new research apart is that it’s detailed in a way “that’s never been done before,” senior author Jimo Borjigin, whose lab is devoted to understanding the neurological basis of consciousness, told AFP. ![]() ![]() In a new paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), researchers at the University of Michigan found evidence of surges in brain activity associated with consciousness in two dying patients. The fact that these stories share so many elements in common and come from people from diverse cultural backgrounds points to a possible biological mechanism - one that has yet to be de-mystified by scientists. “The life review can actually occur when people are not physiologically close to death – there are many cases of life reviews during falls, for instance,” he said.WASHINGTON: Survivors of close calls with death often recall extraordinary experiences: seeing light at the end of a tunnel, floating outside their own bodies, encountering deceased loved ones or recapping major life events in an instant. “I don’t think we can assume this is a representative example of how the human brain behaves at the point of death,” he said, adding it was also a stretch to link an increase in gamma brain waves with flashbacks before death. “This study, showing similar findings in a dying human, is both moving and fascinating, but whether the recorded activity underlies any particular kind of subjective experience – whether so-called ‘near death experiences’, or impressions of life flashing before ones eyes – is impossible to say, and will likely remain so.”ĭr Steve Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University, agreed. “The study extends work from about 10 years ago showing characteristic ‘bursts’ of brain activity in rodents prior to death, with some brain activity persisting even after cardiac arrest – especially in the so-called ‘gamma’ frequency range,” he said Prof Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex who was not involved in the research, said the data was “pretty unique”, noting ethically it was not possible to plan the collection of such recordings. “These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation,” said Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, and a co-author of the study. Nonetheless, the researchers say the results could have important implications. However, the findings are based on the recordings from just one person, and the researchers urge caution, noting among other factors that traumatic brain injuries and white matter damage can affect brain waves, while activity of networks in the brain can be affected by anticonvulsant medication such as that given to the patient. “Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state,” the team writes in the journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience. The study suggests that interactions between different types of brain wave continue after the blood stops flowing in the brain.īut, the researchers add, it also raises an intriguing possibility. The team says analysis of recordings of the 30 seconds before and after the man’s heart stopped beating suggest that in his final moments he experienced changes in different types of brain waves, including alpha and gamma brain waves. However, during the EEG recordings he had experienced a heart attack and died. ![]() When doctors carried out an electroencephalography (EEG), they had discovered the patient had developed epilepsy. The man had been admitted to a hospital emergency department after a fall that resulted in a bleed in the brain, and subsequently deteriorated.
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