Experts Learn More About the Brain During Death
A new study supports previous research about what happens in the brain when we die, at least to some of us
Hiya!
Despite everything we’ve collectively learned as a species, many unexplainable mysteries prevail—and one of them, in particular, is known to haunt us. The age-old quandary of “what happens when we die?” Like many people, I’ve imagined all sorts of answers to that question over the years.
But I’m increasingly becoming aware that our modern and rapidly advancing society might be on its way to finding out — not philosophically, but scientifically. A few studies over the last few years are illuminating our body’s relationship with death, particularly regarding brain activity, which could someday explain the bright lights and memories near-death survivors report.
Previous Research
Waaaaaay back, last year, I told you about an invaluable accident that, while tragic, inched us forward toward learning what happens when we die.
Essentially, doctors were monitoring the electrical activity of an 87-year-old epilepsy patient using electroencephalography (EEG) when the patient suffered a heart attack from a traumatic subdural hematoma and died unexpectedly. A terrible tragedy, to be sure, yet, this patient unwittingly became the first person to have their brain activity recorded during the death process. In fact, the EEG machine recorded a whopping 15 minutes worth of brain activity surrounding the event.
The doctors published a case study about it in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, which includes the EEG recordings and explores possible explanations about what happens to the brain during death.
They discovered that bands of neural oscillations appeared just before and after the patient’s heart stopped working, specifically in gamma waves. If you don’t know, gamma brain waves are considered the fastest brain activity and are responsible for a whole lotta stuff, including learning, memory, and information processing. Too many gamma rays, though, can lead to stress, anxiety, and high arousal, while too little can lead to depression, learning disabilities, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Ideal gamma levels play an (unknown) role in consciousness, mental processing, and perception while also helping us focus, pay attention, and bind our senses, such as matching what we see with what we smell.
Considering their importance, especially regarding memory retrieval, the experts wondered whether this boost in gamma osculations might be responsible for people’s reports of their life “flashing before their eyes” during a near-death experience.
As remarkable as this event was and curious as the results are, replicating the case study into an official experimental study didn’t exactly seem feasible. After all, who wants to volunteer for a study involving inducing near-death experiments? Not me, that’s for sure. As I told you in the first article I wrote about this case study:
Unfortunately, there aren’t any good ways to expand this area of research. The best we can do is keep an eye out for similar accidental incidences.
Well, guess what.
It’s been a little more than a year, but I have an update for you.
New Research
Research published in May 2023 by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by an associate professor in the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology, Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., unintentionally builds on the accidental case we just discussed.
The new study involves EEG data from four patients, all of whom were in comatose unresponsive states and determined to be beyond medical help. They also all ultimately passed away due to cardiac arrest in the hospital, and with their families’ permission, the researchers recorded the patients’ brain activity when they were removed from life support.
Sound familiar? It’s very similar to the accidental EEG readings from the case study. Only this time, the researchers intentionally recorded the event.
In actuality, however, Borjigin’s recent study was intended as a follow-up to animal research she conducted almost a decade ago in collaboration with George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science, and co-author of the recent paper.
Back then, in 2013, the duo recorded the brain activity of rats that died during cardiac arrest and found surges of “synchronous gamma oscillations” occurring for around 30 seconds after the cardiac arrest but before the rats were diagnosed with cerebral death.
These results led Borjigin to investigate if the same is true for humans.
The Study
Okay, so after the four coma patients were removed from their ventilators, two of them had no outstanding or unusual brain activity during their deaths. But… the other two experienced a boost of brain activity in the form of gamma waves, which resembled the results in Borjigin and Mashour’s rat study. And they occurred in an intriguing location known as the “hot zone,” where consciousness is believed to reside in the brain.
Specifically, the hot zone is located between the occipital lobes — which translate what our eyes see into information our brain’s systems can understand — and temporal-parietal junction — involved in everything from memory, language, attention, self-consciousness, social behavior, and more — in the back of the brain, which is also associated with dreaming, altered states of consciousness, and visual hallucinations during epileptic episodes.
Still Have Lots to Learn
If things weren’t interesting enough, both patients had a history of experiencing seizures, though neither had one within an hour before their deaths. While the study doesn’t state anywhere whether either of the patients were diagnosed epileptics, the results are curious to me, considering the initial case study was an epileptic patient.
Could a history of seizure activity in the brain explain why some people experience elevated brain activity at the moment of death? Are they having seizures, or could it be why some people report their life flashing before their eyes or bright lights after near-death experiences? Then again, even with the gamma-wave recordings and the brain areas they occurred in, it’s not like we can ask the patients afterward about their experiences.
Also, all of the participants were males, and I can’t help but wonder if the female brain responds similarly. Plus, with only four subjects total and only half producing the boosted gamma waves, Borjigin’s study was incredibly small. Even if we included the person from the case study, that makes a total of three out of five people that experienced elevated brain activity — which isn’t exactly enough to create any definitive conclusions about what the gamma wave boost means.
A clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan and co-author of Borjigin’s study, Nusha Mihaylova, explains:
"We are unable to make correlations of the observed neural signatures of consciousness with a corresponding experience in the same patients in this study. However, the observed findings are definitely exciting and provide a new framework for our understanding of covert consciousness in dying humans.”
As she says, we don’t have all the answers yet, but this research creates an intriguing glimpse into what occurs inside our brains when we leave this world. One thing all of this research has in common is the activity occurs after a person (or rat) experiences a heart attack. Does the brain produce similar responses during other fatal events?
Perspective Shift
It’s been nearly ten years between Borjigin’s animal study and her recent human one. I suppose it might be a while before we learn anything new, but then again, it’s only been about a year between Borjigin’s human study and the initial case study. Though I found nothing linking the two during my research, the similarities seem too strong to ignore.
Regardless, the possibilities for future research are exciting. Perhaps more extensive studies will emerge that provide much-needed additional data to determine what the recorded gamma activity means and whether it’s evidence of consciousness outlasting death. Or perhaps, that death doesn’t occur quite as quickly as we currently think.
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