Andy’s Quick Hits (206): Your Brain on Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences have fascinated many people ever since they have been reported. And these experiences guide our view of how we die: the memories of your life passing in front of your eyes, the tunnel of light, the floating movement towards a bright light.

However, this has been difficult to research. The nature of being near to death, or briefly dead, means different things may happen in the brain that can cause hallucinations. For example, Olaf Blanke showed that out of body experiences can be induced in healthy individuals by activating and deactivating different parts of the brain.

Enter this case whereby a team of researchers around Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon based at the University of Louisville, actually managed to get EEG recordings of a person as they died.

No this was not a bizarre experiment, which is difficult to run, and would have many moral implications. They had wired up this 87 year-old who was having a severe epileptic seizure, which could be fatal, to try and see what was happening — however this individual had a DNR (do not resuscitate) status and after consulting with the family the patient passed away. This provided the only known example of a person with a quality EEG recording during death.