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).