The human brain shows greater activity than life at the moment of death

The brains of dying people may suddenly come to life at the last minute.

Two apparently brain-dead people taken off life support showed sudden spikes in neural activity, according to a study released Monday.

Findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences scientifically support the explanation of “near-death experiences.” This is a powerful and often mystical experience that occurs when a patient is about to die.

But they’re also shedding new light on the surprisingly obscure question of how we die, said Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan.

In a small study of four patients taken off life support, Borjigin’s team made a surprising discovery. The brains of 2 out of 4 people exploded and came back to life just before they died.

In particular, patients typically showed sudden surges in certain types of brain waves indicative of conscious thought.

The production of these brain waves, called gamma waves, surged up to 300 times above previous levels in one patient just before death.

The dying patient’s gamma wave pattern reached levels higher than those seen in the normal conscious brain.

The processes our bodies and brains go through when we die are poorly understood. The conventional explanation is that death is simply the abrupt termination of life processes, especially brain and heart activity.

For example, scientists don’t really understand what’s going on inside when a seemingly healthy person suffers a sudden trauma, such as a car accident, a fall, or a heart attack, and dies quickly.

“How do you save them if you don’t know exactly how they will die?” Borjigin asked

In reality, you are legally dead when you are declared dead by a medical professional.

The specialist does not make that call based on a search inventory of the patient’s subjective mental state, but on the persistent absence of both heartbeat and brain waves.

After long periods of such inactivity, family members often choose to disconnect the patient from the ventilator, at which point the patient’s body slowly dies from lack of oxygen.

But recent findings suggest that something more complex and harder to detect is at work. Borjigin points out that “hidden consciousness” (a conscious experience that is currently undetectable) continues beneath the surface, leaving the possibility of springing into urgent life as death approaches.

This may be an adaptive response similar to the surge of cognitive activity that wakes a sleeping person (or perhaps airtight), Borjigin says, in time to reverse sleep apnea (a condition in which the body stops breathing during sleep).

“The brain has a very sensitive mechanism that senses oxygen levels in the body,” she said. “Even if your oxygen levels drop slightly, your brain is aware of it and is constantly adjusting your oxygen supply.”

This goes against the idea that the brain is a passive passenger, and Borjigin’s argument makes sense.

“How do you think the brain does nothing when the heart stops, when it stops or isn’t pumping blood? That’s beyond me. The brain must be crazy – it’s That’s exactly what’s happening,” she said.

Her next hypothesis is that the brain discards all other arbitrary things in order to focus on its essential function of survival or self-resurrection.

This exploration of the inner realms of death is a far cry from Borjigin’s original expertise in circadian rhythms and sleep science.

In 2008 she Studying the effects of stroke While researching the brain’s production of sleep-promoting hormones, she stumbled upon a shocking discovery.

Just before death, the brains of machine-connected rats showed a sharp rise in serotonin, a brain chemical deeply involved in thinking and sensing processes.

“As you know, serotonin is an essential neurotransmitter that is important for brain function. When it malfunctions, it can lead to psychotic disorders,” Borjigin told The Hill.

“So my first thought was, ‘Wow. Are mice hallucinating?’

Her second thought was that this serotonin surge was probably a well-understood phenomenon. She was wrong – both about that and understanding the general mechanics of death. “I started looking into the literature and was surprised to find literally so little.”

In the conventional understanding of death, the brain is a semi-passive passenger carried by the heart and dies when the heart dies, Borjigin said.

But that model doesn’t have much room for what Borjigin found: a sudden spike in dying brain activity. She built on these findings in her 2013 PNAS study. Dying rats produced a surge of gamma waves — patterns that indicate consciousness — when you experience a heart attack.

“These data, paradoxically, show that the mammalian brain can generate enhanced conscious processing and neural correlates during the dying period,” her team wrote in a 2013 paper.

This sentence contains an important caveat that permeates this entire study. Dying rats may exhibit ‘correlations’ or signatures of activity associated with coherent brain activity in conscious mammals, but subjective perceptions of what dying rats and humans are experiencing It is currently impossible to know.

Nevertheless, a 2013 paper found that brain activity in dying rats spiked, new york timesThe findings “can hold descriptions of the vivid and realistic visions experienced by some human victims of cardiac arrest,” wrote The Times — about 20% of heart attack patients. Vision reported by

Borjigin wrote at the time that these findings “could explain why some people can actually recall conversations that took place in the operating room when in this condition.”

These discoveries helped push Borjigin to the forefront of consciousness research. An organ that releases hormones that regulate sleep, many philosophical traditions postulate it as the seat of consciousness.

In 2013, Borjigin collaborated with Rick Strassman of the University of Mexico School of Medicine on a study that: Discovery of the chemical dimethyltryptamine (DMT) — The active ingredient in the powerful psychedelic ayahuasca of the Amazon — The rat pineal gland.

Strassman was a leading scientist who helped relaunch research into the medical applications of psychedelics in the 1990s, sparking a renaissance in an area that medicine had largely turned its back on since the 1970s.

Many of Strassman’s hypotheses, including the brain’s release of large amounts of DMT at death, may be related to end-of-life religious experiences, a phenomenon that he suggested is inconsistent with mainstream medical understanding. is incompatible.

But in 2019, Borjigin and Strassman found the brain of a dying rat. DMT surge release likewise.

This is a strong indicator that the human brain is doing something similar, Borjigin. told the interviewer Back then — because cognitive phenomena seen in rats are usually seen in humans, but not vice versa.

However, further investigation is difficult. Testing for DMT spikes is very invasive and very difficult to corroborate because there are no terminally ill volunteers willing to open their skulls when they die in the name of science.

And while the National Institutes of Health has attracted funding and attention over the past few years, Medical applications of psychedelics — especially around cure depression or quit dangerous drugs alcohol again tobacco — These studies are primarily focused on helping people living clearly.

Also, “Psychedelic research has recently had a renaissance, but it is primarily the use of psychedelics as medicines or drugs,” Boldigian added.

Borjigin has not received a single NIH grant since she began studying the cognitive lives of dying people a decade ago, she told The Hill.

“We definitely need to scale up the research, perhaps across the national network, and need NIH funders for this type of research to study more patients.”

This could lead to a reassessment of how the heart and brain work together to avoid the danger of death, and thus a better understanding of their role in keeping us alive. Yes, said Borjigin.