Death seemed to us a terrifying prospect before, but now there is a new terrifying reason for fear. According to the results of recent studies, for some time after the human body ceases to show signs of life, the human brain continues to work and be aware of what is happening to it.
This means that the person can hear how the doctors announce the time of his own death.
These are the findings of a team of critical care and resuscitation researchers led by Dr. Sam Parnia of New York Medical School.
He and his team studied the conditions of people who survived a heart attack - who almost died, but then came back to life. This study became the largest of its kind in the history of medicine.
A significant part of the study participants stated that they were fully conscious, could reproduce the conversations of doctors and describe what was happening around them even after their death was announced. The accuracy of their words was then verified by doctors and other medical personnel present at the time of death.
Death is defined as the moment when the heart stops beating and the flow of blood to the brain stops. The brain stem loses all reflexes - the gag reflex, the pupillary reflex - they are no longer there.
Despite this, Parnia believes, there is reason to believe that an explosion of brain activity occurs after a person's death.
In 2013, researchers at the University of Michigan studied electrical signals in the brains of nine anesthetized rats in a state of heart attack.
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They found activity similar to the state of anxiety for a short time after clinical death.
“Just as other scientists are trying to determine the qualitative nature of such human states as love, for example, we are trying to understand exactly what people experience when they die. This is a universal experience that we will all have to go through when it comes our turn.”
Svetlana Gogol