Closer to the tunnel: science explains brain waves at death

One of the situations that generates the most mysteries in science is what happens to people when time to dieand if efficient that it exists this famous tunnel memory, where people say they follow the light and remember in a matter of seconds the most important moments of their history.

That’s why the study decided to study what happens in the brains of people who were in the death stage, and the findings were impressive: the subjects showed “conscious” brain activity at the time of death.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed a “spike of brain waves” in two people who died after life support was turned off.

Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan, who led the study, commented:How vivid experiences can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the dying process is a paradox in neuroscience. We’ve seen possible neurosignatures of consciousness.”

How the study was done: The team used data from four patients who died in the hospital while their brains were monitored with EEG recordings, all “thanks” to their prior history of seizures, which put doctors on alert.

With the permission of their families, life support was turned off and they subsequently went into cardiac arrest until they finally passed away.

Experiment results:

• When support was removed from the ventilator, two patients experienced an increase in heart rate along with a “burst of gamma wave activity,” which is considered the fastest brain activity and is associated with consciousness.

• Such activity has been found in the so-called hotspot, a region in the back of the brain associated with conscious brain activity that correlates with dreams, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, or altered states of consciousness.

• In contrast, the other two patients did not have the same increase in heart rate or brain activity.