According to new research, it sounds like people might be experiencing a flash of memories as they die.
This was concluded upon studying the brain of a man who passed away while undergoing an EEG.
What this means is that, for the first time ever, medical experts have obtained a more detailed look at a person’s brain as they live their last moments, which could be revolutionary.
As mentioned before, this data was apparently obtained coincidentally when a patient unexpectedly died while having his brain checked for seizures and appears to finally confirm the longtime belief that people’s lives flash before their eyes right before passing away.
The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience earlier this week and according to the reports, the patient, an 87 year old man, had been checked into the hospital following a fall that had left him with serious bleeding in his brain.
After emergency surgery that was needed to fix his injury, the patient stabilized for a couple of days but then started to develop seizures as a result of his serious fall.
As a result, he underwent an electroencephalography (EEG) which is meant to monitor the brain’s electrical activity and the process confirmed that he was indeed having seizures.
However, in the middle of the EEG, the patient’s heart unfortunately stopped, sending him into cardiac arrest.
The doctors followed through with his family’s wishes not to resuscitate him, letting the patient pass away without further intervention.
But because at the time, the EEG machine kept running, it was able to monitor the last moments of his life gathering some unexpected and unique information on what happens to the brain when people are so close to dying.
This comes after many attempts to research what happens to people’s minds and bodies as they are passing away but, for understandable reasons, much of the previous research has simply involved extrapolating what scientists had observed in animal studies to humans.
Other studies have also managed to track people’s vital signs and brain activity after being taken off life support, providing some valuable insight.
However, all that being said, this is the first time that a person’s dying brain has been studied in this much detail via an EEG machine.
The authors of this research say that the most attractive part is that this might be actual proof the stereotypical portrayal of near-death experiences could be close to the truth much more than we’d thought before.
Just before, as well as after the patient’s heart stopped, for example, there was a significant increase in gamma brain waves, which are linked to both learning and memory.
Furthermore, the brain activity that the team of doctors documented as he passed away looked a lot like patterns usually seen in people recalling memories or dreaming.
The report reads that “Such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state.”
However, it is important to stress that these findings are simply based on only one person’s brain readings.
Furthermore, the man also suffered from traumatic brain injuries and swelling, had developed seizures as a result and he was also on anticonvulsants before he passed away, all of these being elements that could have made his brain activity quite a bit different from the one of the average person passing away in other conditions.
At the same time, the research’s authors also note that a lot of what this situation shows lines up with previous lab studies involving dying rats, which might just mean this isolated study could be generalizable.
The authors also stated that they plan on seeking similar cases and that they hope further research will manage to finally prove once and for all whether we see our lives play out in our minds as we die or not.
Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon from the University of Louisville and the study’s author, shared via Frontier Science News that “Something we may learn from this research is that, although our loved ones have their eyes closed and they are ready to leave us to rest, their brains might be replaying some of the nicest moments that they experienced in their lives.”
