People who are resuscitated from near death often report strange sensory phenomena, such as memories “flashing before their eyes.” Now a rare assessment of brain activity just before death offers clues about why such experiences occur.
Anesthesiologist Lakhmir Chawla of George Washington University Medical Center and his colleagues recently published a retrospective analysis of brain activity in seven sedated, critically ill patients as they were removed from life support. Using EEG recordings of neural electrical activity, Chawla found a brief but significant spike at or near the time of death—despite a preceding loss of blood pressure and associated drop in brain activity.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time that this event has been shown to occur,” Chawla explains. “It occurs at a very peculiar time point, when most people would think your brain would physiologically die [because of] an absence of blood flow.”
The jolts lasted 30 to 180 seconds and displayed properties that are normally associated with consciousness, such as extremely fast electrical oscillations known as gamma waves. Soon after the activity abated, the patients were pronounced dead.
Chawla posits that the predeath spikes are most likely brief, “last hurrah” seizures originating in brain areas that were irritable from oxygen starvation. Living nerve cells constantly maintain an electrical charge gradient, similar to the difference in charge on the poles of a battery. Keeping up this polarity takes energy—in this case, energy created from oxygen. As blood flow slows and oxygen runs out, the cells can no longer maintain polarity and they fire, causing a cascade of activity that ripples through the brain. If these seizures were to occur in memory regions, they could explain the vivid recollections often reported by people who are resuscitated from near death, Chawla says.
Further speculation is difficult because in these patients only the forebrain was monitored, notes Chawla, adding that the end of life is a poorly researched area. Next he and his colleagues would like to use more sophisticated imaging on a larger patient population to assess the entire brain in greater detail during near-death episodes.
This article was originally published with the title Going Out with a Bang.
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23 Comments
Add Commentfascinating piece of work. May explain these "near death" experienced and "out of body" reports.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps this is what soul travel Soul never dies; soul, the spark of God that it is, continues it's desination home to God.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe measure, use and transform energy from one form to another, although we don't know what energy is. The Big Bang was from a tiny concentrated point of pure energy so energy existed before the Big Bang. Everything we know of evolved from that expansion of energy. The sum of energy and matter never changes. What they are seeing is the energy of the human brain, the most highly evolved thing we know of in the universe with the design of a star being rather simple in comparison. To our knowledge, if a God exists, that unchanging God must have existed in that early energy. That the last thing to depart in a human body is the energy in the brain sort of falls into place,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLarry Martin, you may believe anything you want to, for any reason you want. Just don't expect a scientifically literate person to agree with you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFascinating...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLarry, next time you post, please change "I" instead of "we". Don't project your ignorance upon the rest of us. You don't speak for anyone but yourself.
for all I know brain death could be excruciatingly painful when cells misfire lose polarity starved of O2. At least I'll only have to find out once like the rest of us, and will try to continue believing that death isn't painful. What if each body part though had such terrible things happen when they died? it could be a damnation except that hell would cool off
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow! Ignorance? Scientifically Literate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMethinks thee two protest too much.
Let me please place a monkey wrench in your protestations:
The "We" in Mr. Martin's comment is indeed a valid we. We measure energy, the way it is transformed and in any way it is used, and if anyone can explain in simple terms what energy is. By the gods! Please do so. Returning to my point:
An intelligent thinking mind allows for the excursion even..oh! Dare I? .. the inclusion of all possibilities. Saying that belief does not fit in the world of Scientific Literacy is having a Belief that science has well defined borders. I feel that if that statement were true we would still be sending runners to bring fire back to the tribe.
I, stressing the ownership of thoughts now, feel that the ability to learn and discover depends in a playful, daring and most importantly, a somewhat childlike open mind.
Thank you Mr. Bluestone for standing up for what science really is. I do seem to recall that Einstein spent decades on what he himself called figuring out "God's mind." So maybe he was also scientifically illiterate...?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan anyone help me out and cite one scientific experiment or analysis of observed phenomenon that can serve as evidence to refute the possibility that the universe was created by some kind of a "super intelligent being" that has qualities beyond the comprehension of our human minds. I am not looking for discusions and opinions, just for straight proof based on the principles of science. Anyone ever tried to disprove the existence of "God" empirically?
I grew up being taught that there ain't such a thing as "God" through elementay school, high school and college, but nobody went to the trouble to bring evidence before using that assuption as an axiom.
Many thanks to anyone with info for me!
I think Larry M. had a lot of great points. For the record, historically scientists have not dismissed the concept of God. That is more a modern problem. The Catholic Church has mixed science and faith for centuries (eg. the Vatican Observatory which is still running strong).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInsightful! Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismore proof that the self and soul are just illusions of electrical activity within a complex atomic structure (the brain).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthank you science, for throwing cold water into the faces of those who hold out hope for life after death. sorry folks, this is all you get. make the most of it.
Could this be the final discharge of the soul?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsidering similar effects of 'near death' have occurred when there is a lack of oxygen doesn't it make sense that the brain is simply speeding up to find a solution to thwart death?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsidering similar effects of 'near death' have occurred when there is a lack of oxygen doesn't it make sense that the brain is simply speeding up to find a solution to thwart death?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon.
Anyone ever tried PROVING the existence of 'GOD' empirically?I grew up in the Pope's homeland Bavaria, being taught there 's a'God', but nobody went to the trouble to bring evidence...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, for me until further notice,, "GOD" is all in the mind, a typical highest primates' projection of the Ultimate Alpha Male, high in the Sky, who "will set things right", and won't let me die....
Thank God I won't get disappointed if there ISN'T one at the end of the tunnel!
The gamma synchrony they observed may well correlate with the frequently described near death experience. Its likely consciousness is in dendrites, and requires less energy than axonal spiking which conveys behavior. So it is logical that consciousness can still occur when the energy is very low and the patient is unresponsive. Consciousness is trapped in the dendrites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my opinion this is an important mechanism to include so as to model the limits of artificial intelligence in context of a life cycle for any given genetic purpose. Mortality often seems overlooked in brain function simulator design philosophy and whether survival modelling is not without trends in clouds of clouds of stars or axons as well. Maybe boring through black holes for information is like facing life after simulated death…;)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe one thing that total belief in science or god have in common is that they are both reflect what we can and cannot understand and imagine or prove. How we as a species can imagine a being like our selves to be responsible for life and natures direction is beyond my comprehension. Why do we need a papa in the sky and surrounding us to love forgive and guide us. Because we can not love and believe in ourselves? We are as a people to scared to take responsibility for our direction choices. When we die we become fertilizer for the flowers on equal terms with plant and sea life. Nutrients for new life. If you want to be an angel or a devil do it now before the big surge of energy and then it won't be so bad if it's painful at least you lived and experienced the choices that only you could of chosen and maybe that is all we have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbsolutely; Newton was famous for saying that he studied physics as a way of drawing him closer to God. Even things that are commonly understood as eliminating the need for God can actually be seen--as I see them--as enhancing God's glory in that these things demonstrate God's ability to leave us with the freedom to choose whether we believe in him rather than forcing us to believe in him by creating life and the world in a way that cannot be explained without invoking God.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt strengthens God's glory, too, that He created the rules and is clearly capable of acting outside them, yet He chooses time and time again to remain within them, to leave us with the option to pretend that He does not exist, to minimize His control over us, to leave us with all the free will we've been given.
And yes, I can provide examples for these; yes, I can explain my viewpoint; yes, I do believe in evolution; yes, I am a liberal.
Does anyone know where I can access the paper by Chawla et al.?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould anyone direct me to the said paper by Chawla et al.?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this