Post #4770

First-ever recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks — School of Medicine University of Louisville Imagine reliving your entire life in the space of seconds. Like a flash of lightning, you are outside of your body, watching memorable moments you lived through. This process, known as “life recall,” can be similar to what it is like to have a near-death experience. What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries. However, a new study from Dr. Ajmal Zemmar of the University of Louisville and colleagues throughout the world, “Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain,” published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death, and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal. When an 87-year-old patient developed epilepsy, Dr. Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu, Estonia, and colleagues used continuous electroencephalography to detect the seizures and treat the patient. During these recordings, the patient had a heart attack and passed away. This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever. What did they find? "We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,” said Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, who organized the study. “Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.” Brain oscillations are more commonly known as brain waves. They are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks. “Through generating brain 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,” Zemmar speculated. Source:University of Louisville @EverythingScience