2023-05-04 09:34:00
What happens in your brain when you’re dying? This is the question that researchers from the University of Michigan, in the United States, wanted to answer.
“How living experience can emerge from a brain during the dying process is a neuroscientific paradox”, says Dr. Jimo Borjigin, the lead author of the study. Their results were published in an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Monday, May 2, 2023.
Brain activity detected in two patients when they died
To carry out this work, scientists studied four patients who died of cardiac arrest in hospital. “All were in a coma and unresponsive, but were kept on life support,” they say. Then, “their cardiovascular and cerebral activities were measured when the patients were disconnected of their artificial respirators.”
Result: two of them, a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman, saw their heart rate increase. In addition, the researchers also found increased gamma wave activity. However, this is “considered to be the fastest brain activity associated with consciousness“, explain the authors.
If this part of the brain is stimulated, it means the patient is seeing something, can hear something, and can potentially feel sensations outside of their body.
But while these conclusions have already been revealed in other studies, researchers at the University of Michigan wanted to go further. They have, in fact, more distinctly examined the part of the brain that was stimulated in two patients. This is a posterior area associated with consciousness.
“This is correlated with dreams, visual hallucinations in epilepsy and altered states of consciousness”, complete the researchers. Gold, “if this part of the brain is stimulated, it means that the patient is seeing somethingcan hear something and can potentially feel sensations outside of his body,” explains Jimo Borjigin.
Near-death experience: more research needs to be done
However, the researchers are unable to find out why the other two patients did not display the same bursts of brain activity as the others. It is also for this reason thatthey “want to be cautious about these manifestations of consciousness during a near-death experience.”
On the other hand, the study was only conducted on a very small sample, so “one cannot draw general conclusions”, warn the authors. “And, as the patients are deceased, whether or not they had visions will never be known.”
However, “these observations are definitely exciting and provide a new framework for our understanding of a secret consciousness in dying humans.”
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