MOSCOW, May 7, Vladislav Strekopytov.Many people who have experienced clinical death talk about the special sensations they experienced. Now scientists have experimentally proved that at the last moment before death, a burst of activity occurs in the brain. The biological mechanism of this effect is discussed in the material.
Stories from the other world
The American philosopher, psychologist and physician Raymond Moody was the first to seriously study near-death experiences. In the book Life After Life, published in 1975, he described the feelings of those who had clinical death.
The book became an international bestseller, it was translated into dozens of languages, circulation exceeded 13 million. And near-death experiences were declared proof of the reality of the afterlife.
The stories collected in the book (there are about 150 of them) are surprisingly close in detail. Talking about the «transition to another world», people talk about a feeling of detachment, weightlessness, painlessness, for a moment there is «the whole life before their eyes», they see dead relatives, less often — luminous incorporeal beings.
A buzz-like sound was often mentioned. At the same time, there was a feeling of moving at high speed through some kind of dark space, similar to a tunnel, at the end of which there is light.
Light at the end of the tunnel< /h3>From a medical point of view, death occurs at the moment of irreversible cardiac arrest. However, the brain remains active for some time — from a few seconds to tens of minutes.
There is a known casewhen the woman was unconscious and not breathing for 27 minutes. She was resuscitated by relatives, then doctors. When she woke up, she asked for a pen, a piece of paper and wrote, «It's real,» pointing to the sky.
Her near-death experience was very rich. The woman saw a light and a figure at some bright yellow gate. In her opinion, these were the gates to heaven, and Jesus stood at the entrance.
In 2013, scientists at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, led by Jimo Borjigin, Associate Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and Department of Neurology, demonstrated that rat brains do not die for at least another 30 seconds after the heart stops beating. The paradox is that the pre-mortem neurophysiological activity exceeded the levels recorded during life. According to physiologists, this indicates that the brain in the last moments starts the mechanisms of accelerated information processing.
Brain waves
According to new dataobtained by this command, the same is true for a person. Studies were performed on patients in the intensive care unit who are in a coma after cardiac arrest. With the permission of their relatives, they were disconnected from the life support system, but they continued to take electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG).
Two out of four patients showed a burst of brain signals in the form of high-frequency gamma waves and an increase in heart rate a few minutes after the cessation of mechanical ventilation support and the onset of oxygen starvation (hypoxia) of the brain.
The volumetric passage of gamma waves indicated that in the near-death period — from cardiac arrest to the cessation of all physiological processes — various areas of the brain continue to work in concert, combining disparate sensations into conscious images.
The greatest activity was observed in the so-called hot zone of neuronal correlates of consciousness, located at the intersection of the occipital, parietal and temporal lobes in the back of the brain. This area is associated with dreams, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. It is also activated during epileptic seizures.
For the first time, the brainwaves of a dying person fixedin 2022 Doctors used electroencephalography to monitor an 87-year-old patient who had seizures after surgery. He died. As a result, continuous EEG monitoring covered both the moment of physical death and some period after it.
«We measured brain activity for 900 seconds and focused on studying the 30 seconds before and after cardiac arrest» — saysstudy leader Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville in the US. “Right before the heart stopped beating, and immediately after that, we observed an increase in neural oscillations of certain frequencies – primarily gamma, but also delta, theta, alpha and beta waves.”
According to Zemmar , different wave ranges are associated with different states of consciousness.
Will to live
Scientists believe that a burst of brain activity during hypoxia is one of the survival mechanisms inherited from distant ancestors, a kind of neurological reaction to cardiac arrest. Animal studies have shown that during hypoxia, the brain releases signaling molecules and generates unusual waves in an attempt to awaken consciousness.
in press releasewords of one of the authors, director of the Michigan Center for the Study of Consciousness, Dr. George Mashur. “The study provides valuable information about the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such phenomena.”
The authors clarify that they studied only the physical side of the processes in the dying brain and do not know what the patients saw or felt.
“We cannot match the observed neural signatures with corresponding experiences in the same people,” said Temenuzhka Mikhailova, MD, who was part of the research team. “Nevertheless, the findings are definitely interesting and provide a basis for understanding the hidden consciousness of dying people.”
Because of the small sample, the authors consider the results to be preliminary and warn against any global conclusions. Especially considering that two out of four patients did not have an increase in neurophysiological activity after being disconnected from the life support system.
«We do not exclude the possibility that a burst of gamma power is a sign of a pathological process that is characteristic only of the stage of dying and is not associated with conscious processing,” write the authors of the article.
At the same time, scientists note that the processes in the dying brain deserve special attention, since discoveries in this area could potentially lead to the creation of new life extension strategies.
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