Clinical death is a rare occurrence. However, in the overwhelming majority of cases, after it, people retain mostly positive emotions in their memory, even if very painful injuries have led to this stage. This conclusion was reached by Belgian scientists who analyzed the stories of patients who survived this phenomenon and compared them with the activity of the brain in an unconscious state.
People who had such an unusual experience described it as an emotional experience with sensations that do not correspond to the body, and tunnels of light.
Steven Laureys, a neuroscientist at the University of Liege who works with people in coma and vegetative states, began the study after his patients told him about their own experience of near-death.
“I kept listening to these incredible stories during the consultations,” he says. “Given the abnormal brain activity during cardiac arrest or trauma, the memories were impressively rich. It was very intriguing."
There are several hypotheses that explain the occurrence of such memories, for example, limiting the supply of oxygen to the brain or damage to the areas that control emotions.
Laureis's team analyzed 190 documented near-death experiences and compared them with patients' death stories during drowning, cardiac arrest, and head injuries. Then the scientists resorted to statistical analysis and used the so-called Grayson scale, which allows assessing the intensity of various features of clinical death.
Most often, clinical death is experienced by people who are in intensive care after serious head injuries, scientists write in an article in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Often, people who have been rescued from drowning experience such an experience. At the same time, the stories of patients differ depending on the nature of the injuries they received.
The most common feature was an overwhelming sense of calm. The next most common sensation was the feeling of leaving the body shell. Many people have felt a change in perception.
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Only in isolated cases did people talk about negative experiences. Very rarely, patients experienced clinical death the way it is shown in films, that is, with running memories from a past life or visions of the future.
Laureis's team will now try to find an objective explanation for all these phenomena. To do this, scientists will scan the brains of people in a vegetative state or coma. The purpose of this work is to understand what processes in the brain are triggered by the memories of the experience of clinical death, and thereby expand the understanding of science about human consciousness.