This is what imminent death can feel like

We must all die. And since no one has returned yet, we don’t really know what will happen to us when life ends for good. However, there are people who have reached the threshold of death and then found their way back to life. Some tell of light at the end of a tunnel, others describe how they saw their own body from the outside. Apparently, those affected often also experience that their lives unfold before their inner eyes like a movie.

According to 2003 surveys by the German chapter of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, nearly 90 percent of people who had a near-death experience (NDE) reported being filled with a “sense of calm, peace, or well-being.” “. been. Over three-quarters said they saw a “bright light”; more than 60 percent said they felt like they were outside their bodies and saw it from the outside. The tunnel phenomenon occurred in nearly half of those affected, and nearly a third reported seeing events in their lives as if they were in a movie.

It is striking that the reports of these people are comparable – regardless of their age, gender or education level. Their cultural and religious background also had no influence on whether or not such experiences took place and their form. For this reason, scientists assume that there is a biological mechanism behind the phenomenon.

Numerous scientific studies have therefore been devoted to the question of what goes on in the brains of dying creatures – be they humans or animals. So does a new study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It can provide new insights into the dying process.

The research team led by University of Michigan neurologist Jimo Borjigin recorded brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) in four comatose patients who were dying. The results of their study indicate that the brain is hyperactive at the time of death. This could be a key to understanding near-death experiences.

Earlier experiments by the same research team on rats had already shown that their brains produced remarkably synchronous patterns of gamma waves in the first half minute after cardiac arrest. So did two of the four deceased patients, a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman: when their ventilators were turned off because there was no hope of improvement, their heartbeats accelerated and surges occurred at the gamma frequency.

This gamma-ray activity continued even after the heart stopped beating. In one of the two patients, the measured values ​​in the moments before her death were three hundred times higher than before. They were even higher than the levels measured in the normal brains of fully conscious people. Other studies have shown that the same pattern occurs when a healthy person is dreaming, learning, or actively remembering something.

When brain cells connect with each other, they synchronize their activity: they align their wavelengths. In this way, distributed groups of cells can communicate with each other without mixing different types of information. Gamma waves are the strongest brain waves – their frequency is between 25 and 140 Hertz (delta waves, which are especially dominant during deep sleep, oscillate at a frequency of only one to two Hz). They occur during intense cognitive activity, such as studying, problem solving, or reminiscing. Such waves can also be measured while dreaming or during deep meditation.

Peaks in gamma waves have been measured in previous studies in deceased or dead people. An article published last year in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience reported similar patterns of brain waves in a patient whose brain activity was measured randomly when he died. The 87-year-old man suffered epileptic seizures after a fall and therefore had to be checked with EEG. He unexpectedly suffered a heart attack, which resulted in his death.

The two patients described in the current study who showed gamma wave spikes had also had epileptic seizures, but not shortly before their death. What was particularly interesting was the area in her brain where this increased electrical activity was detected: It was the junction of the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes in the back of the brain.

Neurologists associate this area with dreams, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness. “When this part of the brain lights up, it means the patient is seeing something, hearing something, and possibly feeling something in the body,” notes Borjigin. She hypothesizes that the increased brain activity is due to the brain going into survival mode when oxygen is deprived.

It is known that the lack of oxygen that occurs after death causes a number of changes in the brain. It shuts down communication between nerve cells, releases a swarm of signaling molecules and creates unusual brain wave patterns. The neurons again have an electrical output that propagates in the form of a discharge wave. The dying organ tries to revive itself, so to speak, while closing the outer signs of consciousness: “It closes the door to the outside world and deals with internal affairs because the house is on fire,” as Borjigin puts it It.

However, it is difficult to say to what extent these processes take place consciously in any way. No one can know what the patients studied in the current study experienced, as they have died and can no longer describe what happened to them. This, and the fact that the number of samples is very small, makes it impossible to make general statements about the significance of the research results.

The research team also warns: “We cannot exclude that the increase in gamma levels is a sign of a pathological process that occurs only in the dying phase and has nothing to do with conscious processing.” And it points out that a link between the study results and near-death experiences has not been proven: “We are unable to establish correlations between the observed neural signatures of consciousness and a corresponding experience in the same patients in this study.” Nevertheless, the observed results are certainly an impetus for further research into the consciousness of the dying. (i.e)