Some people report this after a near-death experience. A US study now suggests that at the moment of death, our brains actually trigger memories.
This suggests brain waves recorded from a dying patient in a hospital. The fact that this brain activity was recorded at all is due to a coincidence: the treating physicians performed several electroencephalograms (EEG) on an 87-year-old who had undergone head surgery after a fall and was suffering from epileptic seizures.
An EEG records the electrical activity of the brain. During such a recording, the patient suffered a heart attack and died. A total of 15 minutes of brain activity was recorded as the man died. “Just before and after the heart stopped, we saw changes in a certain frequency range of the neuronal oscillations,” explained study leader Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville.
Similar to near-death experiences
These brainwaves map patterns of rhythmic neuronal activity. Different waves are associated with diverse functions, with the frequency patterns described in the study being similar to those seen when meditating or recalling memories. This suggests that shortly before death, the brain may play back last memories of important life events by generating such oscillations, “similar to near-death experiences”.
Frank Erbguth, medical director of the Nuremberg University Clinic for Neurology, is not surprised by the observations: “It is nothing new that the human brain creates its own world of images in certain situations.”
This is known, for example, from migraine patients, but also from drug users. Accordingly, near-death experiences fit into a number of different phenomena in which the brain produces images.
What happens in the brain is easy to explain. With death, the carbon dioxide content in the cells increases: “This leads to a change in the brain’s electrical system and brain metabolism – near-death experiences are located on these two keyboards.”
This could also be experienced by people who are particularly good at meditating.
Source: Nachrichten
