Light at the end of the tunnel: scientists have discovered a dying surge of consciousness

Photo: © Unsplash

Photo: © Unsplash

Mankind has been thinking about whether there is life after death for more than one century, and the stories of people who have experienced clinical death only stir up interest. Recently, scientists conducted an experiment during which they recorded a burst of brain activity before death. Journalist RIA News Vladislav Strekopytov spoke about the biological background of this mechanism.

Pioneer

For the first time, an American philosopher, psychologist and physician, Raymond Moody, took up a serious study of what people can see before death. In 1975, he published the book “Life after Life” with 150 stories of those who experienced clinical death.

The most surprising thing was that the stories were very similar. As a rule, people, talking about their death, claim that at that moment they felt detachment, weightlessness and painlessness, and at some point their whole life literally ran before their eyes. Someone also sees dead relatives, and someone sees disembodied luminous beings.

In addition, many have mentioned that before they died they heard a buzz, and they had the feeling that they were moving at great speed through a dark space, very similar to a tunnel, at the end of which there was invariably light.

As a result, the book became a bestseller. It has been translated into several dozen languages, and the circulation has exceeded 13 million. The stories contained in the book became proof of the existence of another world. Later scientists came to similar conclusions.

Medically

If we consider death from the point of view of medicine, then it occurs when the heart stops irreversibly. However, this does not mean that the person has died completely, since the brain still continues to function – from a few seconds to tens of minutes.

In 2013, scientists at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, led by Jimo Borjigin, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology, recorded that the brain of a rat still works for at least half a minute after the heart has stopped. At the same time, pre-mortem neurophysiological activity exceeded the levels that were during life – a direct indicator that in the last moments of life the brain starts the process of accelerated information processing.

Later, they conducted another study, which showed that in humans, the body functions in a similar way. The test subjects (with the permission of relatives, of course) were four patients in the intensive care unit who fell into a coma after cardiac arrest. They turned off all life support systems, while continuing to take ECG and EEG (electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms).

Photo: © RIA Novosti / Ilya Pitalev

A few minutes later, all the subjects experienced the expected hypoxia of the brain. After another time, two of them showed a burst of brain signals in the form of high-frequency gamma waves and an increase in heart rate. This indicated that in the pre-death period, different 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 neural 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”– writes Strekopytov.

In 2022, for the first time, doctors managed to record the brain waves of a dying person. EEG monitoring, which continuously worked for 900 seconds, showed that before the cardiac arrest in the patient’s body, there was an increase in neural oscillations of gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves.

According to scientists, such a surge of brain activity during oxygen starvation may be one of the survival mechanisms. That is, by highlighting signal molecules and generating unusual waves, the brain tries to awaken consciousness. At the same time, scientists clarify that this is just the physiological side of the issue, and they cannot know what the subjects felt and saw.

“We cannot correlate the observed neural signatures with corresponding experiences in the same individuals. However, the findings are definitely interesting and provide a basis for understanding the latent consciousness of the dying.”– said Temenuzhka Mikhailova, Doctor of Medical Sciences, who was part of the research team.

Moreover, the sample was very small, so scientists call the results preliminary and are in no hurry to draw any conclusions on this topic. Nevertheless, the researchers say, the processes in the dying brain are very interesting and may help to find a way to extend a person’s life.

Source: Ren

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