And they're certainly going to be stymied by some of the unusual personal accounts of people that were dead for a short time.
Well, not completely dead, just mostly dead.
Posted on 04/04/2023 5:53:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
The first time I reached past the sheer horror of the concept of death and wondered what the experience of dying may be like, I was about 15. I had just discovered gruesome aspects of the French revolution and how heads were neatly cut off the body by a Guillotine.
Words I remember to this day were the last of Georges Danton on April 5, 1794, who allegedly said to his executioner: “Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.” Years later, having become a cognitive neuroscientist, I started wondering to what extent a brain suddenly separated from the body could still perceive its environment and perhaps think.
Danton wanted his head to be shown, but could he see or hear the people? Was he conscious, even for a brief moment? How did his brain shut down?
On June 14, 2021, I was violently reminded of these questions. I set off to Marseille, France, having been summoned to Avignon by my mother because my brother was in a critical state, a few days after being suddenly diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But when I landed, I was told my brother had passed away four hours ago. An hour later, I found him perfectly still and beautiful, his head slightly turned to the side as if he was in a deep state of sleep. Only he was not breathing anymore and he was cold to the touch.
No matter how much I refused to believe it on that day, and during the several months that followed, my brother’s extraordinarily bright and creative mind had gone, vaporised, only to remain palpable in the artworks he left behind. Yet, in the last moment I was given to spend with his lifeless body in a hospital room, I felt the urge to speak to him.
And I did, despite 25 years of studying the human brain and knowing perfectly well that about six minutes after the heart stops, and the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, the brain essentially dies. Then, deterioration reaches a point of no return and core consciousness – our ability to feel that we are here and now, and to recognise that thoughts we have are own own – is lost. Could there be anything of my beloved brother’s mind left to hear my voice and generate thoughts, five hours after he had passed away?
Some scientific experiments Experiments have been conducted in an attempt to better understand reports from people who have had a near death experience. Such an event has been associated with out-of-body experiences, a sense profound bliss, a calling, a seeing of a light shining above, but also profound bursts of anxiety or complete emptiness and silence. One key limitation of studies looking into such experiences is that they focus too much of the nature of the experiences themselves and often overlook the context preceding them.
Some people, having undergone anaesthesia while in good shape or having been involved in a sudden accident leading to instant loss of consciousness have little ground to experience deep anxiety as their brain commences to shut down. On the contrary, someone who has a protracted history of a serious illness might be more likely to get a rough ride.
It isn’t easy to get permissions to study what actually goes on in the brain during our last moments of life. But a recent paperexamined electrical brain activity in an 87-year-old man who had suffered a head injury in a fall, as he passed away following a series of epileptic seizures and cardiac arrest. While this was the first publication of such data collected during the transition from life to death, the paper is highly speculative when it comes to possible “experiences of the mind” that accompany the transition to death.
The researchers discovered that some brain waves, called alpha and gamma, changed pattern even after blood had stopped flowing to the brain. “Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state,” they write.
However, such coupling is not uncommon in the healthy brain – and does not necessarily mean that life is flashing before our eyes. What’s more, the study did not answer my basic question: how long does it take after the cessation of oxygen supply to the brain for the essential neural activity to disappear? The study only reported on brain activity recorded over a period of about 15 minutes, including a few minutes after death.
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. Some studies have also shown that this brain shutdown is accompanied by a release of serotonin, a chemical associated with arousal and feelings of happiness.
But what about us? If humans can be resuscitated after six, seven, eight or even ten minutes in extreme cases, it could theoretically be hours before their brain shuts down completely.
I have come across a number of theories trying to explain why life would be flashing before someone’s eyes as the brain prepares to die. Maybe it is a completely artificial effect associated with the sudden surge of neural activity as the brain begins to shut down. Maybe it is a last resort, defence mechanism of the body trying to overcome imminent death. Or maybe it is a deeply rooted, genetically programmed reflex, keeping our mind “busy” as clearly the most distressing event of our entire life unfolds.
My hypothesis is somewhat different. Maybe our most essential existential drive is to understand the meaning of our own existence. If so, then, seeing one’s life flashing before one’s eye might be our ultimate attempt – however desperate – to find an answer, necessarily fast-tracked because we are running out of time.
And whether or not we succeed or get the illusion that we did, this must result in absolute mental bliss. I hope that future research in the field, with longer measurements of neural activity after death, perhaps even brain imaging, will provide support for this idea – whether it lasts minutes or hours, for the sake of my brother, and that of all of us.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I had sudden death syndrome so I was not drugged until they put me in a coma.
“Proof of Heaven”
I do believe I’ve read that one. Something about a young girl dying and came back to. She met her brother who died before she was born-parents never told her. Then she talked about a goofy hat and shirt the father wore at the honeymoon before she was born. They didn’t tell her that either.
Years ago, I heard of an African tribe that had a tradition of launching the heads of freshly decapitated bodies into the air. They would bend a sapling over and tie it down with a basket attached at the top. Right after the victim was axed, the head was put in the basket and the vine cut so the head was hurled high into the air. Perhaps a kind of euphoric final journey for the departed.
Makes you go, ‘Hmmmm...’
You can do that with a cat..................
Just giving the dearly departed a head start on their journey......................
Forward thinking, really!
Oh they heard me alright lol. I was still kind of out of it when I came to. They got a hellfire and damnation sermon that evening.
“I think it was the Gospel of Barnabas that stated Jesus went to Hell when he died, before his ascent to Heaven.”
Ok, I thought Christians all knew this. People who died believing in God’s promises before Christ did not go to Heaven. This was because Jesus had not yet come and so they were not yet born again. They went to a place, adjacent to Hell called Paradise to await the Messiah. When Christ died on the Cross, made SIN for us, He indeed went to Hell, and conquering death, left there after being received by all those awaiting Him in Paradise. When He left, He took all of them with Him to Heaven. This is all in the Bible, not in some gnostic non biblical writings. Look it up.
Some mornings I wake up or even during an afternoon nap, when I awaken sometimes it’s out of total nothingness, I have to wonder if that’s what it’s like when death overcones you. Total blank.
No dreams hardly shifted in bed, it’s kind of weird but I have gotten used to it, and don’t find it perplexing.
I had a cousin who went to bed at 51 and passed on. His covers were undisturbed. He was fortunate in that regard.
I haven’t had a near-death experience but I have been plucked from extenuating circumstances and have absolutely no recollection how I was immediately removed from dangerous circumstances. That has happened 4 times in my life. I wasn’t unscathed, but literally removed away from certain death. I figure it wasn’t my time. Perhaps angels, but I cannot comprehend why that would be, except grace, or continued presence to care for loved ones.
Age has a way of softening the fear of death. I continuously prepare for a death devoid of material struggles for my family as in having my affairs in order, decluttering etc... my father died suddenly but mother was taken care of and lived for another 25 years. Father was very honorable in his obligation to see things rightfully prioritized.
It’s all one can do.
"We live for just these twenty years
Do we have to die for the fifty more?"
That reminds me of the old joke, "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did, not screaming in terror like his passengers".
wait, so DID the executioner show the head to the people?
would have *loved* to read that his head was shown and he remained conscious enough to say, “Be sure to drink your……” and then nothing….leaving generations to battle over what he meant. :)
We all started dying the minute we are born. Mortality is a bummer.
This is why we call it Faith.
A man who is born once dies twice, a man born twice dies once.
OK, not a frog but a dog - true story.
One evening the ranch dog walked into the open walk-in freezer by the ranch kitchen, and got shut in.
The next morning he was found there, frozen stiff.
He was laid in the sun. Later, he got up. He seemed to act the same as before his incident. He was thereafter called “Deeper”.
These atheists groping around, trying to cope with the idea of death. So cute.
Glad you made it.
We’re all in God’s Waiting Room, but He just hasn’t called us into His Office for the final app’t, yet.
Good joke!
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