You can imagine walking across an endless field or being surrounded by loved ones. Or perhaps you are walking through a long dark tunnel, at the end of which a bright, inviting light shines.
In any case, when the end comes, your last experiences will be shrouded in mystery, known only to you, however, scientists argue that these last moments of consciousness can be accompanied by something amazing and mysterious that happens inside your brain.
Back in 2013, researchers from the University of Michigan found that after clinical death in rats, brain activity increased rapidly, demonstrating electrical impulses reflecting processes of consciousness, which in level exceeded the signals recorded in the same animals in a waking state.
"We believed that because the near-death state is associated with brain activity, neural correlates of consciousness should be identified in humans and animals even after the cessation of circulation in the brain," said neurologist Jimo Borjigin, who was part of the research team.
This is what they found in the experiment: Anesthetized rats showed bursts of brain activity with a high degree of synchronization within 30 seconds after induced cardiac arrest, comparable to the processes that could be observed in highly excited brains.
The discovered phenomenon was an unexpected discovery that can refute the prevailing idea that, due to the cessation of blood flow as a result of clinical death, the brain must at this moment be completely inert.
"This study showed that lowering oxygen levels, or both oxygen and glucose, during cardiac arrest can stimulate brain activity that is characteristic of conscious activity," said Jimo Borjigin. "It also provided the first scientific basis for explaining the various experiences of near death reported by many patients who survived cardiac arrest."
Of course, although the results obtained by scientists actually create a new basis for interpreting the causes and nature of these "events" after death, it is not at all the fact that humans will be found to have the same cognitive flashes as rats who made a trip to the next world.
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At the same time, if our brains are found to be activated in this way at the time of near-death, it may help explain the sense of awareness that many patients who have successfully undergone resuscitation in critical condition report.
The person who knows a thing or two about this is Critical Care Therapy Researcher at the State University of New York at Stony Brook Sam Parnia, who has published the world's largest scholarly work on the experience of near-death and out-of-body experiences.
From interviews with more than 100 cardiac arrest survivors, it was found that 46 percent retained memories of their encounter with death. Most of these memories were associated with the same general themes, including glare, family members, and fear.
However, much more surprisingly, two out of a hundred interviewed patients were able to recall the events associated with their resuscitation, which occurred after they died, which completely contradicts the generally accepted views on the possibility of maintaining consciousness in a state of clinical death.
“We know that the brain cannot function after the heart has stopped beating. But in this case, consciousness appears to have persisted for about three minutes after the heart stopped working, Parnia told the National Post, "although the brain usually stops functioning 20-30 seconds after the cardiac arrest."
It sounds amazing, but it's worth noting that this phenomenon was recorded in only 2 percent of patients, and Parnia himself later admitted that "the simplest explanation is that this is probably an illusion." This "illusion" may be the result of a neurological response to physiological stress during cardiac events. In other words, cognitive experience precedes rather than accompanies clinical death as such. And it is he who is stored in the patient's memory.
Of course, this is how many in the neuroscientific community tend to think. "You know, I'm skeptical," Cameron Shaw, a neuroscientist at Deakin University in Australia, told Vice earlier this year. "I think the out-of-body experience is just fiction, because the mechanisms that create visual sensations and memories do not work in this state."
Because the blood supply to the brain is from the bottom, according to Cameron, brain death occurs from the top down.
“Our sense of self, our sense of humor, our ability to think about the future - all of this goes away within the first 10-20 seconds, - told Vice Julian Morgan. "Then, when a wave of bloodless brain cells spreads, our memories and language centers are shut off, and in the end only the nucleus remains."
Not a very encouraging point of view, but it is worth noting that it also contradicts the results of experiments on rats. And scientists are still finding evidence of amazing biological processes going on very actively even a few days after death.
So we still don't have the answers, and while science has given us amazing new insights into what's happening to the brain in the last moments, this research is not yet conclusive.
As already mentioned, we have no clear idea of what we will see and feel when the curtain comes down. But we can be confident that eventually we will all know.
Igor Abramov