Reports of near-death experiences, with stories of white light, visits from deceased loved ones, hearing voices, among other attributes, capture our imagination and are deeply embedded in our cultural landscape.
The fact that these reports share so many common elements raises the question of whether there is something fundamentally real behind them, and that those who have managed to survive death provide glimpses of an awareness that does not completely disappear, even after the heart is broken. stops. hitting.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesprovides early evidence of a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain.
The study, led by Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology, and his team, is a follow-up to animal studies conducted nearly ten years ago in collaboration with George Mashour. , MD, Ph.D., founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Sciences.
Similar signatures of gamma activation were recorded in the dying brains of animals and humans following a loss of oxygen following cardiac arrest.
“How vivid experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the dying process is a neuroscientific paradox. Dr. Borjigin has led a major study that helps shed light on underlying neurophysiological mechanisms,” Mashour said.
The team identified four patients who died of cardiac arrest at the hospital while under EEG monitoring. All four patients were comatose and unresponsive. Ultimately, they were determined to be beyond medical help and, with the permission of their families, life support was removed.
Upon removal of the ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness.
In addition, activity was detected in the brain’s so-called hot spot of neural correlates of consciousness, the junction between the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes in the back of the brain. This area has been correlated with dreams, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.
These two patients had prior reports of seizures, but no seizures within an hour before death, explained Nusha Mihaylova, MD, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor in the Department of Neurology who has collaborated with Dr. Borjigin since 2015 at collect EEG data from deceased patients under ICU care. The other two patients did not show the same increase in heart rate upon removal from life support nor did they have increased brain activity.
Due to the small sample size, the authors caution against making global statements about the implications of the findings. They also point out that it is impossible to know in this study what the patients experienced because they did not survive.
“We cannot make correlations of the observed neural signatures of consciousness with a corresponding experience in the same patients in this study. However, the observed findings are definitely exciting and provide a new framework for our understanding of covert consciousness in dying humans. “. ” she said.
Larger multicenter studies including EEG-monitored ICU patients surviving cardiac arrest could provide much-needed data to determine whether or not these bursts in gamma activity are evidence of hidden consciousness even near death.
Other authors of this article include Gang Xu, Duan Li, Fangyun Tian, Peter M. Farrehi, Jack M. Parent, and Michael Wang.
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