The new science of death: 'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense'

[littlemissmartypants]

This article is more than 8 months old

The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

This article is more than 8 months old

New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

By Alex Blasdel

Tue 2 Apr 2024 00.00 EDT

Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness. Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived.

Dying seemed like such an important area of research – we all do it, after all – that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death. But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit. Among them was Patient One.

Snip...more... https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/02/new-science-of-death-brain-activity-consciousness-near-death-experience

[hlthe2b]

1. Fascinating... I do want a scientific approach (non-"spiritual," non-"faith-based" approach to studying this

The Guardian piece does a nice job of exploring where we are in this regard. It will leave a lot of people thinking "what if" especially given the rare but real viable resuscitations that have occurred well after nearly all CPR efforts would have ceased.

While I hope it does not ultimately make too many reluctant to let patients go who truly have little prospect for recovery of both brain AND body especially those who have lived a long productive life, it does make me wonder about some "brain death" cases and whether or not they may be as clearly defined as we once thought.

[Easterncedar]

2. Excellent article

I subscribe to the Guardian but had missed this. Thanks for posting!

[keithbvadu2]

3. 1+

[Clouds Passing]

4. Excellent article.

Even though the body and brain experience physical processes during death, do those brain activities actually produce the experiences of otherworldliness? Or are the experiences of otherworldliness actually real? Death is cellular and complete in the body, yet the loss of consciousness we know little about. The study of consciousness is going to need ingenious experiments to test these hypotheses.

Lamas emphatically state that our consciousness goes on lifetime after lifetime.

[Karadeniz]

5. The article gives the soul deniers credibility by insisting that BRAIN activity

continues or increases as death nears or occurs at death.The spurt in brain activity is not due to brain energy, but to the lessening of brain energy on the MIND. The mind, in healthy people displays tons of behavior that can't possibly be arising from the physical brain. (Your Eternal Self book, which has nothing to do with religious or spiritual messaging.) The soul and soul energy, however, not being tethered to the physical, can still generate energy. These researchers are limiting the validity of their work. How do blind people under anaesthesia have the ability to see? How can someone under anaesthesia travel to where family members are and hear what they're talking about? How can details about a dead person's life be retrieved by someone totally disconnected to the deceased?

Studying brain waves does not lead to answers to the vastly larger picture of MIND phenomena.