Scientists are trying to understand what the powerful bursts of electrical activity, recorded on the encephalograms of the dead, mean
Experiments by Anton Coenen and Tineke van Rijn from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands made us think about the soul again. And with renewed vigor, disputes about whether this mysterious substance really exists.
"Wave of death" - a burst of electrical activity in the brain - on the human encephalogram
Photo: Credit unknown / kp.ru
And rats
Photo: Credit unknown / kp.ru
Dutch scientists, commissioned by a university ethics committee, sought answers to two practical questions. How badly are laboratory rats, which have to be sacrificed to science, suffer? And what is the most humane way to kill them?
In the end, the answers were received. It turned out that for laboratory animals there is nothing better than decapitation. That is, decapitation, the unpleasant sensations from which, as it turned out, last (in rats) no more than 4 seconds.
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However, the strange phenomena that Anton and Cache encountered, having carried out beheading of 25 animals, took the research in a completely different direction - to the mystical one.
To their surprise, to put it mildly, the experimenters found bursts of brain activity in the severed heads. We saw them by chance, out of pure curiosity, having removed encephalograms a few minutes after the "execution".
Running a little ahead, I will say: the results obtained by the Dutch greatly spoiled the impression of the sensational experiments carried out by their American colleagues from the George Washington University Medical Faculty. Two years ago, they recorded violent electrical phenomena in the brains of deceased people. And they assumed, to the delight of the media around the world, that they had found the physiological basis of mystical visions associated with near-death experiences. And it became a real sensation. Since a hypothesis was born immediately: the encephalograms captured nothing more than the process of separation of the soul from the body.
And now the rats. Demonstrate similar mysticism. There is one of two things: either rats also have a soul, or optimism about the existence of this immaterial part of human essence is premature.
Signs of life after death
In 2009, Americans filmed encephalograms - pictures of the electrical activity of the brain - from seven patients who were dying of cancer or the effects of a heart attack. It was no longer realistic to save these people. They eventually died. But after death, all the unfortunates' brains seemed to explode. Incredibly powerful bursts of electrical impulses arose in him - there were none during his lifetime.
“At first we couldn't believe our eyes,” says the head of experiments, Dr. Lakhmir Chawla. - They thought that the bursts in the encephalograms were generated by mobile phones or other working electronic equipment. We took care to exclude such influence. And again we saw anomalies.
Photo: Credit unknown / kp.ru
Doctors ventured to suggest that such a strange activity is precisely connected with those vivid visions that people who have returned from the other world sometimes tell about.
Believers naturally saw in the abnormal bursts of electrical activity a long-awaited proof of the existence of the soul. Even vague and controversial. After all, there were no other, confirmed by devices, material evidence. But there is a completely scientific hypothesis that the process of separating the soul from the body resembles the discharge of an electrical capacitor. And in the first moments of death, almost 90 percent "fly off", the rest - in the period from the 9th to the 40th day.
Nothing more than electricity
In the severed head of a rat, a "splash" occurs about a minute after decapitation. And it continues for about 10 seconds.
In humans, the brain “flashes” two to three minutes after the heart stops and blood flow to the brain stops (this is tantamount to separating the head from the body). The activity lasts approximately three minutes.
Scientists called the detected anomalies "death waves". And now they are wondering what they would mean.
The hypothesis about a soul that takes time to leave the body looks beautiful, of course. Here even rats can be “tolerated”, assuming, after all, that there is a place for them in the afterlife. In this sense, it looks quite logical that a large - human - soul flies off in three minutes, and a small - rat - much faster.
From a materialistic point of view, the effect observed simultaneously in humans and in animals only testifies to the fact that there is a certain phenomenon associated with physiological processes taking place in the dying brain.
According to one of the hypotheses, the EEG of the deceased displays the moment when the soul leaves the body
Photo: Credit unknown / kp.ru
“Bursts of brain activity in severed heads or in those that have been deprived of blood supply can be explained without mysticism,” says Dr. Chawla. - All neurons are connected in an electrical circuit. From a lack of oxygen, they lose their ability to hold an electrical potential. And they are discharged - they emit impulses like an avalanche.
“It looks like there is indeed a collapse of neural electrical potentials in the dying brain,” Konen agrees. - After all, "live" neurons are under a small negative voltage - about 70 millivolts. They hold it by pumping out positive ions. Dead neurons very quickly change polarity - "minus" turns into "plus". Perhaps, as a result of this process, a “wave of death” arises.
In a word, nothing sublime - electricity and nothing else.
The border between the world of the living and the dead
“The Death Wave shows that the brain has really died and it is no longer possible to restore the functioning of neurons,” says Konen. - Seeing her, one can understand that it is no longer worth fighting for the patient's life. The "wave of death" is a kind of border between the world of the living and the dead.
- What if a burst of activity indicates a desperate attempt by the brain to restore the work of the heart? - disagrees with colleague Lance Becker, resuscitator at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
According to Becker, the "death wave" may signal that the neurons just stopped working, and not "broke" completely and irrevocably. Consequently, resurrection is possible beyond this “threshold”.
“I was once taught that irreversible changes occur in a brain deprived of oxygen,” says the scientist. - But now we know that this is far from the case. In experiments, doctors bring pigs back to life 15 minutes after cardiac arrest. And without any harm to the brain. And no one knows for sure what the deadline is.
But where is the light at the end of the tunnel?
There is also no consensus about the visions reported by patients who have returned from the other world.
Dr. Chawla does not exclude that bursts of electrical activity - those very "waves of death" - can create the most bizarre pictures in the brain - from bright light to tunnels and other hallucinations.
Powerful impulses, perhaps, can stir up long-term memory for a while - as if to highlight it. And then his whole life will flash before the eyes of a person. Long-dead relatives will "appear". Clinical death survivors talk about all this.
However, the patients of Dr. Chawla did not return from the other world. And I didn't have a chance to listen to their stories. Likewise, no one has yet taken encephalograms from those who later managed to resurrect. Therefore, the scientist's theoretical constructions have not yet been verified.
Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who has long studied visions that accompany the transition to another world, doubts that they are associated with "waves of death." The concomitant depolarization of neurons, he said, often occurs during epileptic seizures. But those who woke up after them do not remember anything special.
In general, according to Nelson, the riddles of "death waves", as well as near-death visions, cannot be considered solved.
COMPLETE MYSTIC
Severed heads help win the lottery
It seems that 15 years ago Russian researchers experimented with the “waves of death”, not yet knowing that this is a real biophysical phenomenon. They also chopped off the heads of rats, like their Dutch counterparts. But the goal was different - very mystical. And if you believe the report compiled later, then it - this goal - was achieved.
The experiments were carried out by the head of the laboratory of terminal states Vladimir Nesterov and his colleague Yuri But at the Omsk Medical Academy at the Department of Topographic Anatomy and Operative Surgery. They were financed by some mysterious American firm YGH, headed by the Dutch.
The experiments were based on a "discovery" attributed to the Nobel laureate in physics Denes Gabor. Like, back in 1971, he discovered that any biological object at the time of death and regardless of the type of death generates photon radiation of increased power.
Denesh Gabor is a famous scientist, just in 1971 he received the Nobel Prize for the invention of holography. That is, for working with light. But whether he detected "photon radiation" from the dead is not known. There is not a single mention of this in the works of the scientist.
Nesterov and Booth did not register any "death radiation" from the animals they killed. But supposedly they observed a reaction to him from the volunteers.
The essence of the experiments was as follows: a rat whose head is chopped off is placed between the subject's temple and a generator of electromagnetic waves. The latter intensifies the "radiation of death" and directs it to the brain of the volunteer. Dale look what impact it has.
“The claimed method has been successfully tested by the authors in guessing the winning numbers of money and clothing lotteries,” the researchers wrote in the report. - The number of gains in the group of subjects exposed to a magnetic field in the presence of a biological initiator (cadaveric material) was. 3.72 times higher than in the control group."
“The level of intuitive perception rises by several orders of magnitude,” Nesterov and Booth explained. - Each person can become clairvoyant in these conditions, like Vanga.
What is the further fate of the scandalous experiments is not known. It is possible that they have sunk into oblivion, like others like them, which were carried out in the 90s of the last century during the exuberant flowering of pseudoscientific theories and the ebullient activity of the Kashpirovsky, Chumaks, the inventors of antigravity, torsion fields and perpetual motion machines that pump energy from vacuum. Then it all seemed promising and promising. But, in the end, it could not stand the tests of serious science. Or deliberately did not go to check.
What if in Omsk, back in 1996, they found an unexpected effect from the surge in electromagnetic activity that the Americans and the Dutch recently observed? And this is not excluded. Then the anomaly may hide more than just physics …
