Most people sooner or later think about what happens when we die. Some of us have even been on the brink of death, only to come back with strong memories of what happened. Life may have passed in revue, they saw a bright light or everything was completely dark. Now the death of an 87-year-old man has given us new knowledge about the moment of death. The man had fallen and hit his head. He had a brain hemorrhage. At the hospital in Canada, the doctors removed a good part of the bones in the skull to make more room for the brain and stop the bleeding. The 87-year-old showed signs of epileptic seizures, so the doctors put electrodes on his head to get information about what was going on inside the brain. At the same time, they gave him medication for the seizures. The man got worse and worse. After three days he died with the EEG machine on his head. This has given the researchers a unique starting point. Life in revue – You can’t plan this, says researcher and neurosurgeon Ajmal Zemmar to Insider, who helped treat the 87-year-old. Namely, no healthy people are allowed to connect to an EEG before they die. And the doctors do not know when sick patients are going to die, so that they can record the brain waves. – It seems that this patient received a brain signal at death that is somewhat similar to what we see in a person who remembers things from the past. This is a single case, but one can well speculate that life is in review. That’s what Thanh Pierre Doan says, who is a neurologist at St. Olav’s hospital and a researcher at the Kavli Institute and INB at NTNU. Thanh Pierre Doan thinks the research is exciting. Photo: Jelena Balic It is not the first time that doctors have placed EEG electrodes on the head of a dying patient. – But the people behind the research were good at using clinical measurements to investigate basic brain mechanisms when you die, says Doan. A dying brain When people die, you might think that the brain is turned off, almost as if with a switch. But that’s not quite how it works. Doan says that death is not as sudden as many imagine. – It is a process that takes many hours. Even if the heart stops pumping blood into the brain, these brain oscillations continue for a while. He says that it is the rhythm between the brain waves of the dying 87-year-old that is particularly interesting. In the published article, the researchers show that the gamma waves, which are important for memory, increase relative to the other brain oscillations in the 30 seconds before and after death. – It was also seen that the cross-connection between different waves is very strong after the patient died. The cross-linking between alpha and gamma activity is something that is supposedly linked to remembering things, says Doan. – It can support that the patient just before, during the process and after death had an electrical pattern in the brain that is quite similar to that of a person who remembers things. It does not mean that everyone experiences that life passes in review when we die. Because it is only between 2 and 13 per cent of those who have survived a cardiac arrest who have had near-death experiences. Of those again, it was 13 per cent who experienced that life passed by in a revue. Unique data Six years have passed since the 87-year-old passed away. The researchers waited to publish the study because they hoped that others would appear who found the same thing. But so far they have found no corresponding registrations. Zemmar says it is very difficult to draw major conclusions from this one patient, especially as the 87-year-old had bleeding, seizures and medication that affects brain activity. – But what we can say is that we have signals just before and after the heart stops that are similar to what happens in healthy people who remember something or meditate, he says. Researchers have seen something of the same in rats. In one study, they found that the rats get similar brain waves when they die. A brain after death Brain signals in animals can also partially be brought back to “life” several hours after they have died. In 2019, researchers at Yale published a study on pigs. They got 32 pig heads from a slaughterhouse near New Haven, Connecticut. Then slices of the brain were connected to a system that made them able to get the neurons to become active again. It was still possible for the cells to talk to each other, even though the pigs were in no way alive. Neurosurgeon Zemmar believes that the findings that have been made after the 87-year-old died may offer a little hope. He tells Frontiers that it is difficult to give the news of death to grieving families. – Something we can learn from this research is that even if our loved ones have closed their eyes and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the finest moments they have experienced in their lives, he says. .
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Does life pass in revue when we die? A study gives new hints – news Trøndelag
