Your Life May Actually Flash Before Your Eyes
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The activity of a dying human brain was recorded for the first time ever in a new study published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
🧠 The setup: Scientists didn’t set out to study such activity – it happened by chance. They were continuously monitoring the brain of an 87-year-old epileptic patient for seizures and inadvertently captured the data when the patient died suddenly of a heart attack.
- As such, they managed to record 15 minutes of brain activity around the time of death. The study focused on the 30 seconds on either side of when the patient’s heart stopped beating.
📋 The results: During that time, researchers detected increased activity in the types of brain waves known as gamma oscillations, which are involved in processes like dreaming, meditation, and memory retrieval.
- Similar changes have previously been detected in rats, but never before in humans.
- The study’s authors concluded that the human brain “may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.”
✋ Yes, but… They also stressed that their results should be taken with a grain of salt, since the data comes from a single case study of a patient whose brain was already experiencing unusual activity related to epilepsy.
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