For the first time, doctors were able to collect detailed brain wave activity before and after a sudden death. One researcher says the readings broadly suggest the patient may have seen his life "flash before his eyes," but others disagree.
Doctors in Estonia were monitoring an 87-year-old patient who suffered epileptic seizures after a fall. While the electroencephalogram (EEG) machine was reading his brain waves, the patient suffered a heart attack and died. The medical team brought in international collaborators to study the data 30 seconds before and 30 seconds after the heart stopped. "They found that brain waves remain active and coordinated during and even after that transition into death," reports Popular Science.
"Two types of brain waves were most active: Gamma waves, which are especially associated with dreaming and memory retrieval; and alpha waves, which are associated with information processing and the visual cortex," writes Hannah Seo. "The team speculates this could indicate 'life flashing before your eyes' in the moments before death."
“It is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state,” the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on Tuesday.
Several caveats should be considered in the discussion of this unique evidence. First, this is the EEG of one person at the moment of death. It doesn't necessarily mean we'd see similar readings in other patients.
Second, the patient was suffering from epileptic seizures, which might have skewed the EEG readings one way or another at the time of death. The drugs he was given also may have played a role in the EEG readings.
Finally, "Each different type of brain wave is associated with a plethora of different cognitive functions—they’re more sweeping categories of brain activity than indicators of any specific thoughts," writes Seo. We have yet to master the cognitive language of the brain in any great detail so that we can determine exactly what a dying brain is experiencing. We have a general idea of what the brain is "seeing," but the actual images escape us.
The anecdotal evidence of one's life flashing before one's eyes, like a sped-up movie, is compelling. It's so prevalent in the near-death literature that most researchers accept a life review experience (or life review phenomenon) or a compressed life review (CLR) as fact in an unknown percentage of patients.
Steve Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University in England, told The Guardian that trying to link gamma ray activity in the brain at death with a CLR is a stretch. “I don’t think we can assume this is a representative example of how the human brain behaves at the point of death," Taylor said.
“Whether the recorded activity underlies any particular kind of subjective experience—whether so-called ‘near death experiences,’ or impressions of life flashing before one’s eyes—is impossible to say, and will likely remain so,” Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the U.K.’s University of Sussex who was not involved in the research, told The Guardian. Seth added that since there was no ethical way to obtain data like this except by accident, the data collected is "pretty unique."
That's about the best we can say about these EEG readings. As for giving us a window into the soul, or revealing some of the mysteries surrounding the cessation of life at the moment of death, we'll just have to wait our turn to have the mysteries of the cosmos and the infinite unfold before us.
