2023-05-05 16:56:28
American researchers have observed a burst of brain activity in patients at the time of their death. This might, they say, explain the near-death experiences witnessed by many survivors of cardiac arrest.
“At the frontiers of life, consciousness proves to be infinitely more elusive than anything science has previously assumed.“, writes the journalist Patrice Van Eersel in the literary survey “C’est pas la mort” published in April 2023 (ed. XXI Bis). conscience is it limited to a cognitive phenomenon? Maybe, maybe not, but one thing is certain: the body knows different states of consciousness that can modify the perceptions of what surrounds us. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by 10-20% of cardiac arrest survivors from all over the world. Seeing one’s life pass before one’s eyes when one is faced with death or having an extracorporeal experience would it then have a scientific explanation? This is a mystery that researchers from the University of Medicine of Michigan (United States) are trying to solve, whose work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Intense brain activity at the time of death
It is a retrospective study for which the researchers studied the brains of people who died of cardiac arrest and were kept on life support, the withdrawal of which caused brain death. The 4 patients concerned died while they were under electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring, which made it possible to measure and record their cerebral electrical activity throughout this process.
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When the respiratory assistance was stopped, a burst of gamma waves was observed in 2 of the 4 patients (two women aged 24 and 77) in a state of imminent death, and an acceleration of the heart rate. Gamma waves (>25Hz) are emitted during a intense intellectual and mental activity and are considered a potential marker of consciousness[…]
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