Scientists accidentally discovered a never-before-seen phenomenon when a man suddenly died during a routine brain scan, indicating that a memory review of our lives may “flash before our eyes” when we die.
Brain scan accidentally captures life flashing before man’s eyes at death
During a routine EEG in 2016, unexpectedly, a man suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack. When the neurologists reviewed the brain scan later, they realized they had accidentally made the first-ever recording of a dying brain.
An 87-year-old Canadian man who had developed epilepsy went in for a routine electroencephalogram (EEG) – a brain scan – that looks for abnormalities in the brain’s electrical activity. Live Science reported that doctors wanted to learn more about what happened during the man’s seizures.
Patterns never seen before by neurologists
Immediately after the patient’s death, the EEG recorded approximately 900 seconds of brain activity. In this first-of-its-kind recording, neurologists were able to observe neural oscillations – repetitive patterns of neural activity, known as brain waves – and how they changed as the man was dying. What astonished the neurosurgeons was that there was an unusual change in brainwave activity in the 30 seconds before and after the man’s heart stopped.
Similar observations have been made and experienced with rats, with rodents having gamma oscillations around the time of death. But this is the first EEG to capture human brainwave activity at death.
Scientific proof of a near-death experience?
In normal activity, the most common frequency oscillations or brain waves people exhibit vary between beta waves (16-30 hertz), which occurs during alertness, concentration, and cognition, or alpha waves (8-15 hertz) with relaxation, creativity, and visualization.
The most common brain waves observed when people access their memory center are gamma waves. These are usually seen in a region of the brain called the hippocampus during dreams, and the frequency is between 30 and 100 hertz – the highest frequency of any brain oscillations. These ways are associated with peak focus, insight, and expanded consciousness.
The man achieving gamma waves during death pointed neurologists to conclude that the intense brain activity was indicative of the man replaying memories from throughout his life – a phenomenon known as life recall.
People who have had a so-called “near-death experience” often report going through a “life recall.”
“Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing the last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,” according to a statement issued by Dr. Ajmal Zemmarsaid, the senior researcher and a neurosurgeon at the University of Toronto in Canada at the time, now at the University of Louisville and Kentucky.
The problem for researchers is that, even though rodent experiences show similar patterns, this is the only such recording of its kind with a human. Therefore, there are no other tests on human beings to make comparisons with to establish patterns and consistencies.
Researchers caution that much more evidence is needed to draw concrete conclusions about a life recall at death.
