In a recent study, scientists said that they have found that people who are dying have more brain activity, which is similar to being aware. The study could give experts new ways to learn more about how people die, the Guardian said.
Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan, who led the study, said, “It is a neuroscientific paradox that vivid memories can come from a brain that isn’t working right when a person is dying.”
Borjigin also said, “We saw potential neuro-signatures of consciousness.”
The researchers used information from EEG recordings of the brains of four people who had died and who were thought to have had seizures before they died.
It was decided that the four patients could not be helped because they were asleep and not responding.
After getting permission from their families, the patients’ life support was turned off. After that, they went into heart arrest and died.
As the life support was taken away from the patients, their brain activity was watched until they died.
After the ventilator was taken away, two of them had an increase in heart rate and a rise in gamma wave activity. Gamma waves are the fastest waves in the brain and are linked to awareness.
Borjigin said, “This could mean that the patients are waking up on the inside.”
The action was found in the hot-zone of the brain, which is in the back of the brain and is linked to conscious thought.
Scientists have linked this area to dreaming, visual hallucinations in people with epilepsy, and different states of awareness in other studies of the brain.
The study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the other two patients’ heart rates and brain activity did not go up in the same way.
Scientists said it was hard to know for sure what the brain activity might have been like as a subjective experience.
Borjigin said, “It could be activating internal covert consciousness and bringing up memories from the past. It could also be a brain survival mechanism; we don’t know.”