A dying person’s brain waves have been accurately recorded by neuroscientists for the first time.
Research published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience looked at 87-year-old male patient admitted to hospital following a serious fall left him with a brain haemorrhage. Following an operation to treat the injury, the man briefly stabilized for two days before developing convulsions. He then underwent electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain. But halfway through, the man’s heart stopped beating and he soon died.
Because the EEG machine continued to work for the last minutes of the man’s lifedoctors have obtained a unique set of data… So scientists have finally taken a closer look at what happens inside the brain during death.
We remember our life at the time of our death
“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around time of death and we focused on what happened in the 30 seconds before and following the heart stopped beating”explains Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, in the United States.
“Just before and following the heart stopped working, we found changes in a specific band of neural oscillationscalled gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.
Right following the patient suffered the cardiac arrest that led to his death, his brain activity revealed a relative spike in the power of the gamma band that interacted the most with alpha waves: a pattern similar to memory recall.
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Scientists, however, are not yet jumping to conclusions.. Scientists only benefit for the moment from this first case study, and the interpretation of the data, in this case, is delicate since the individual suffered a brain injury and had epileptic seizures.
Nevertheless, according to the authors, it is proof that there may be something real in the stereotypical representation of a near-death experience.
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Source : Sciencesetavenir
