Recording the electrical activity of a human brain while the person is dying sounds like a gruesome experiment, but this happened by accident. Doctors were monitoring an 87-year-old epilepsy patient's brain waves constantly, looking for warnings that he was about the have a seizure. But then he died of a heart attack. Fifteen minutes of the patients' electroencephalogram recording was made available to researchers, who focused on the readings in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped.
They noticed increased activity in gamma oscillations, the type of brain wave associated with dreaming and memory retrieval. Lead author Dr. Ajmal Zemmar said, “Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.”
However, the scientists cannot draw any concrete conclusions from one subject, especially one who was hospitalized for brain injury related to epilepsy. But it is intriguing. Read more about the study at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting
Image credit: Flickr user fdecomite (CC BY 2.0)
#EEG #electroencephalogram #brainwave #death #epilepsy
Image: Vicente R., et al. Front. Aging Neurosci., 22 February 2022