Scientists may understand how your brain dies: study

Scientists are one step closer to learning more about the experiences that people have reported having just before they die — including the light at the end of the tunnel.

A surge of activity happens in dying human brains that resembles being awake, even after the person stops breathing, according to new study published Monday in the journal PNAS.

“If you talk about the dying process, there is very little we know,” Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School who led the study, told Live Science.

“This is maybe the first study to really show second-by-second how the brain dies,” he said, noting that there aren’t many people who’ve had their brain studied while in the process of dying.

“While the mechanisms and physiological significance of these findings remain to be fully explored, these data demonstrate that the dying brain can still be active,” according to Borjigin, who co-authored the study with Dr. George Mashour, founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science.

“They also suggest the need to re-evaluate role of the brain during cardiac arrest.”

The researchers tracked four people who were dying due to cardiac arrest as they were taken off their ventilators, and found that two of them had a rush of gamma waves, which are some of the fastest brain waves you can experience, according to Healthline.

This happened about 30 seconds to two minutes after the patients were taken off of the ventilators.

The study authors explained that these gamma waves could mean that patients experienced some form of consciousness, similar to being in a lucid state.

One part of the brain that experienced a high activity of gamma waves was the temporoparietal junction, behind the ear.

According to Live Science, that area can be particularly triggered when someone is having a dream or an “out of body experience.”

In order to gather this information, the University of Michigan researchers monitored the dying patients by using electroencephalogram monitoring, which are sensors that attach to one’s scalp to detect electrical activity in your brain waves.

However, researchers did note that because the patients did pass away, it is unclear exactly what they experienced as they were dying and if this brain activity even relates to death at all.

Even though we have heard tales of people who have had a near-death experience, their brains can be different as they didn’t end up dying, researchers reported.

In 2013, Borjigin and a group of researchers also studied the brain activity of rats who had been “euthanized via cardiac arrest,” and found that they also experienced a surge in gamma waves about 30 seconds after their hearts stopped, according to Live Science.

A similar study of an 87-year-old man by a different group of doctors in 2022 found that the same thing happened to him as in the rats – 30 seconds before and after his hearts stopped, there was a surge of gamma waves in his brain.

Earlier this year, one man detailed his near-death experience after he had complications from a heart-valve operation.

“I wasn’t looking down at my body, but I was separate from my body,” 55-year-old Kevin Hill told South West News Service at the time.

“It was like I was in the spirit realm. I was conscious of what was going on, but I had so much peace.”

In January, country singer Shania Twain also claimed that she had a near-death experience during her battle with the coronavirus, describing it as something “like science fiction.”