Researchers from the University of Michigan, USA, They found evidence of sudden increases in mental wave activity high frequency in specific regions of the brain of two dying patients.
these waves, associated with consciousness, could explain the wide range of memories of extraordinary experiences manifested by survivors of near-death situations.
Very often, dying people who have regained their conscious state later report seeing a light at the end of a tunnel or having the sensation of being outside their own bodies.
They also report that they met deceased loved ones or that they were able to recapitulate important events in an instant, as if life were passing before their eyes. The fact that these stories come from people of diverse cultural backgrounds and share common elements points to a possible underlying biological mechanism.
What brain regions were activated?
The team reviewed the electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of four dying patients before and after clinical withdrawal of their ventilatory support and found that the resulting global hypoxia markedly stimulated gamma activities in two of the patients, a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman. The a was monitoredbrain and heart activity second by second, during his last hours of life.
Increased gamma connectivity, associated with consciousness, took place within the temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junctions and between the TPO zones and the contralateral prefrontal areas. The researchers believe that these data demonstrate that the dying brain may still be active. Your results the publishedMonday, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
Jimo Borjigin, who directed the work, commented to AFP that, although it is not the first investigation of its kind, what is original about this study is that it details the process of brain activation in a way “that has never been done before”. During this work, they further examined which parts of the brain lit up and found that these areas are associated with changes in consciousness.
A very speculative field
“If this part of the brain turns on, that means the patient is seeing something, can hear something, and can feel sensations outside of the body,” Borjigin explained, noting that that region was “on fire”. The experts attributed the difference in behavior of the four study participants to the fact that the patients who experienced the potential signs of “covert awareness” had a history of seizures that may have primed their brains in some way.
The authors of the study cautioned that due to the small sample size it was not possible to make far-reaching inferences and that they could not confirm that the patients actually had visions.
The entrance They decode what happens in the brain shortly before death was first published on newspaper TODAY.
