Ultimate mental clarity is a phenomenon often seen in terminally ill patients when they experience a sudden surge of energy, alertness, and awareness before death.
Why do some people experience maximum mental clarity before death?
Biologist Michael Nahm defined this phenomenon in an article published in the journal Near Death Research as follows:
“The appearance of normal or unusually heightened mental faculties in unconscious or mentally ill patients shortly before death, including marked elevation of mood and spiritual affectation or the ability to speak in a previously unusual spiritual and upbeat manner.”
Michael Nam has been researching near-death lucidity for many years. He is also co-author of a related research paper with Bruce Grayson.
Their study showed that mental clarity not only occurs in terminally ill people, but even extends to people with mental illness. Extreme clarity of consciousness has even been seen in people who lived with dementia for years, returned to their previous cognitive functions, and died some time later.
How long before death does this condition occur?
Further research by scientists determined that a state of mental clarity can occur hours, days, weeks, or even months before death.
As scientist Basil Eldada of the National Institute on Aging told The Guardian, preliminary research seems to confirm that near-death mental clarity is real.
“I think it’s safe to say that this phenomenon exists, and it’s probably more common than we expect.”
Why is this happening?
Historical cases of maximum mental clarity have been attributed to the consequences of a change in brain physiology before death, although there has been no sufficiently detailed explanation to support this theory.
This phenomenon is indeed puzzling as it occurs in patients whose brain functions are thought to be irreversibly damaged by the disease, as is the case with Alzheimer’s disease.
How, then, is it possible for the deleted memories to become available again? At the moment, we just don’t know.
In reports of extreme lucidity, people endured illnesses and brain injuries such as brain abscesses, strokes, and tumors to remember memories and people they thought they had lost. They recalled long-forgotten events and people they thought they had forgotten.
Among some of the most amazing stories is that of a young girl named Anna (“Käte”) Katharina Emer. Käthe was reported to have been handicapped from birth and was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she suffered multiple and severe meningitis infections that damaged her brain.
Despite all this, and despite the fact that she never learned to speak, she could be heard humming something under her breath in the last half hour of her life.
According to the biologist Nam, if extreme lucidity can lead to such a deep remission of mental disorders before death, then understanding it could be critical to “the development of both improved treatments and a better understanding of the unresolved aspects of cognition and memory processing.”
The scientists’ discovery also raises questions about where memory is actually stored, and whether the brain is really its repository.
In the meantime, we await further understanding of this curious phenomenon.
