Posted on 03/09/2017 6:33:20 AM PST by Red Badger
Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit have stumbled on a very strange case - when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead.
For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep. And it's an entirely different phenomenon to the sudden 'death wave' that's been observed in rats following decapitation.
"In one patient, single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP)," the team from the University of Western Ontario in Canada reports.
They also found that death could be a unique experience for each individual, noting that across the four patients, the frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of their brain activity displayed few similarities both before and after they were declared dead.
"There was a significant difference in EEG amplitude between the 30-minute period before and the 5-minute period following ABP cessation for the group," the researchers explain.
Before we get into the actual findings, the researchers are being very cautious about the implications, saying it's far too early to be talking about what this could mean for our post-death experience, especially considering their sample size is one.
In the absence of any biological explanation for how brain activity could possibly continue several minutes after the heart has stopped beating, the researchers say the scan could be the result of some kind of error at the time of recording.
But they're at a loss to explain what that error could be, as the medical equipment show no signs of malfunction, meaning the source of the anomaly cannot be confirmed - biologically or otherwise.
"It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG activity given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation," the researchers write.
"These waveform bursts could, therefore, be artefactual [human error] in nature, although an artefactual source could not be identified."
You can see the brain scans of the four terminal patients below, showing the moment of clinical death at Time 0, or when the heart had stopped a few minutes after life support had been turned off:
The yellow brain activity is what we're looking for in these scans (view a larger version here), and you can see in three of the four patients, this activity faded away before the heart stopped beating - as much as 10 minutes before clinical death, in the case of patient #2.
But for some reason, patient #4 shows evidence of delta wave bursts for 10 minutes and 38 seconds after their heart had stopped.
The researchers also investigated if a phenomenon known as 'death waves' occurred in the patients - in 2011, a separate team observed a burst of brain activity in rat brains about 1 minute after decapitation, suggesting that the brain and the heart have different moments of expiration.
"It seems that the massive wave which can be recorded approximately 1 minute after decapitation reflects the ultimate border between life and death," researchers from Radboud University in the Netherlands reported at the time.
When the Canadian team looked for this phenomenon in their human patients, they came up empty. "We did not observe a delta wave within 1 minute following cardiac arrest in any of our four patients," they report.
If all of this feels frustratingly inconsequential, welcome to the strange and incredibly niche field of necroneuroscience, where no one really knows what's actually going on.
But what we do know is that very strange things can happen at the moment of death - and afterwards - with a pair of studies from 2016 finding that more than 1,000 genes were still functioning several days after death in human cadavers.
And it wasn't like they were taking longer than everything else to sputter out - they actually increased their activity following the moment of clinical death.
The big takeaway from studies like these isn't that we understand more about the post-death experience now than we did before, because the observations remain inconclusive and without biological explanation.
But what they do show is that we've got so much to figure out when it comes to the process of death, and how we - and other animals - actually experience it, from our bodies to our brains.
The research has been published in The Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.
H/T: Discover
bookmark
Reduced brain activity, post-mortem ?
Democrat votes !
They can probably detect more brainwave activity in a dead person than in Nancy Pelosi.
A greater mystery is the total lack of brain activity for those living that vote democrat.
Yup, that's much like Pelosi's brain alright!
I recall an account of a young nobleman scientist during the French Revolution that decided to do an experiment at his upcoming execution by guillotine, he declared to his friend that he would blink his eyes after the decapitation for as long as he could- the friend documented 13 deliberate blinks of both eyes before the end....
Anyone who thinks death is immediate- meaning the extinguishing of the soul and departure of the life from a person has been watching too much TV. The hard facts is that life is stubborn- and only after the organism is incapable of sustaining life does the soul depart....
It only takes a single instance to learn at the abattoir that even animal life lasts so time after the body is “dead”.
P4L
Bookmarked.
Easy for me to explain. It’s called God. Numerous near-death cases claim an out-of-body “floating” experience before being revived and one neurosurgeon also showed his own charts that showed brain activity while he was otherwise completely dead.
I think God or his angels are having a final conversation with the patient before he/she heads for the light or heads away from the light into eternal darkness.
Of course, scientists aren’t free to conclude that. It becomes a spiritual issue, not a scientific one. But like the Resurrection itself, science can only display the data and let the spiritual form its own conclusions.
“1907,when a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall devised experiments that he expected would actually measure the soul. Using six terminally ill patients on a specially-constructed scale bed, he measured their weight before, during, and after death. His results were mixed, but he concluded that there was indeed a very slight loss of weight, 21 grams on average.”
http://www.livescience.com/32327-how-much-does-the-soul-weigh.html
Some say the test group wasn’t large enough or that he used crude instruments. Still, there appears to have been a weight loss. It would be interesting to see a study done today.
If decapitation shortens this brain activity from ten minutes to one then obviously decapitation is what they should do.
Zombie apocalypse
Well said
Thanks.. Will Read Later....
post-mortem delta waves could be a result of chemical breakdown energy...........................
The arrogance of people who think they can declare the moment of death. “Clinical death” is the best guess.
This does not mean the rat they killed is still alive. It means there is a recorded current.
Fact is they don’t know and I wish they’d stop putting rats on the guillotine.
“REAL” Dead = BRAIN dead. ZERO brain activity. If you have ZERO brain activity, your heart is not beating, you are not breathing.
Doctors “PROCLAIM” people brain dead, when they are NOT DEAD. They look at “higher” brain functions, not all brain functions.
Doctors “PROCLAIM” people dead because of lack of heartbeat or respiration, when they are NOT DEAD. (dead people wake up in the MORGUE).
Physical death is so FINAL, can’t we be CERTAIN before proclaiming people dead? (Terri Schiavo)
No pulse, no respiration = dying, not dead. Just wait a few more minutes and they will be “brain dead” also.
If these people were having “brain activity” they weren’t dead, YET.
Reasons?
Doctors God complex, proclaiming death.
Wait for it...... MONEY!!!! Yes it’s all about the money.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.