After analyzing the electroencephalogram of a dying person, a group of scientists found that the brain waves emitted before death follow rhythmic patterns similar to the rhythmic patterns that occur during sleep or entering a state of meditation.
According to the researchers, this may explain why people who have experienced near-death experiences say that “life flashed before their eyes.”
The results of the work of an international group of scientists are published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
In the article, in particular, as an illustration, an analysis of the electroencephalogram of an 87-year-old patient who died suddenly due to cardiac arrest, just at the moment when the device recorded the activity of his brain, is attached. There you can see that the brain remained “active and coordinated during the transition to death and even after the cessation of blood flow.”
According to experts, for the first time they were able to study the behavior of this organ for a few seconds before and after death. And the graphs suggest that the patient “may have had vivid visual memories of his life.”
“By generating oscillations associated with memory recovery, the brain can reproduce the last memories of important life events shortly before death, similar to those told by people who survived clinical death or were close to death,” one of the members of the group, Ajmal Zemmar, commented on what he saw.
According to him, this is the first case of measuring brain fluctuations at the time of death of a person:
“These results challenge our understanding of exactly when life ends and raise important follow-up questions […] What we can learn from this study is that even if our loved ones have closed their eyes and are ready to go, their brains can reproduce some of the sweetest moments they’ve experienced in their lives,” Zemmar concluded.
