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Sep 14, 2023 · Parnia is the senior author of a new study designed to uncover what he calls the “hidden consciousness” of death by measuring electrical activity in the brain when the heart stops and breathing...
- Overview
- Near-death experiences difficult to study
- Covert consciousness
- A bioethicist reacts to the study
•New research shows a surge in brain activity at the time of death.
•The activity takes place in a part of the brain known for dreams and altered states of consciousness.
•Researchers say the findings could help explain the vivid near-death experiences (bright lights, hallucinations) reported by people who were close to death.
What happens to our consciousness when we die?
It’s perhaps the biggest question — and source of angst — when it comes to the human condition.
Those who report near-death experiences can offer a tantalizing glimpse of what our final moments feel and look like. Many of these experiences are strikingly similar, with people reporting vivid experiences that include visions of deceased loved ones, bright lights, and the feeling of floating through the air.
While it’s simple enough to conduct experiments on animals, it’s tough on both an ethical and practical level to study humans in the final stages of life.
Prof. Borjigin said that she and her colleagues wanted to do justice to the earlier data to see if the human brain responded to death in the same way observed in a rat brain.
To that end, the brain activity of four people who passed away in hospitals while being monitored by an EEG (electrogram) device was studied.
“The data generated, even though it’s only four patients, is massive, so we were able to only report a fraction of the features that it’s actually showing on the data,” Prof. Borjigin said.
At the time of death, brain activity was detected in the TPJ region of the brain — named because it’s the junction between the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes in the back of the brain.
The TPJ already has a known association with dreaming, hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness.
While it’s impossible to know what the patients experienced during these brain surges, this increased activity in the TPJ could help explain vivid near-death experiences.
Even though the patients weren’t visibly conscious, the uptick in brain activity showed covert consciousness — in other words, consciousness that can’t be detected using bedside exams because the patient is incapacitated.
“[People who’ve had near-death experiences] may remember seeing or hearing things, or having an out-of-body experience or motion perception as if they’re flying,” Prof. Borjigin explained. “I think that we have potentially at least defined or discovered minimum anatomical steps to neurosignatures of covert consciousness. We’d like to be able to study human subjects under less devastating circumstances, where the patients are known to be able to survive and then tell the story where they can correlate their brain signature with a subjective experience.”
In order to make this correlation, patients who survive cardiac arrest while being monitored by an EEG device could be interviewed to see if their brain waves line up with their experience.
In any event, studying the brain waves of dying patients can help us better understand the dying process, which is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Exploring the interplay between the pulmonary system, cardiac system and brain may shed new light on the nature of consciousness.
“What this study really suggests is that the brain is undergoing some chemical changes during the dying process. It explains the perceptions people have about seeing angels or light at the end of a tunnel,” Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, told Healthline. “What it shows is that the brain has measures that it takes to try and wake itself up and fires off in ways that can be hallucinatory.”
Many people are curious about what happens next after death, but this study is very preliminary and doesn’t go down that road, he said.
- Dan Gray
Mar 4, 2022 · In rats, experiments have established that after a few seconds, consciousness is lost. And after 40 seconds, the great majority of neural activity has disappeared.
Sep 15, 2022 · A Neuroscientific Perspective. What happens when we die? Unless we accept a religious explanation, the only remaining possibility seems to be the annihilation of consciousness. But another possibility is consistent with evidence from neuroscience.
Dec 4, 2018 · Rick Strassman, a professor of psychiatry, observed in a study from 1990 to 1995 that people had near-death and mystical experiences following injection of DMT. According to Strassman, the...
Apr 12, 2022 · Summary: Scientific advances in the 20th and 21st centuries have led to a major evolution in the understanding of death. At the same time, for decades, people who have survived an encounter with...
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Nov 6, 2022 · One in five people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death, a new study shows.
