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1/16/2017 Dying brains: will our last hurrah be an explosion of conscious experience?

 | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian

Dying brains: will our last hurrah be an


explosion of conscious experience?
Not necessarily, but new animal research gives us a tantalising glimpse of life before death

Flatliners: might it be possible one day to bring people to the brink of death and back again, in the name of science? Photograph:
Sportsphoto/Allstar

Chris Chambers
Monday 12 August 2013 15.00 EDT

What does it feel like to die? Most of us have no idea, but around 1 in 10 people who survive a
cardiac arrest report having near death experiences (NDEs). These can range from relived
memories to vivid experiences of light, sound, and emotion.

An interesting new study by Jimo Borjigin and colleagues at the University of Michigan, published
in PNAS, may help explain what happens in the brain immediately before death. The researchers
induced cardiac arrest in rats while measuring electrical activity in the brain using
electroencephalography (EEG). What they found was remarkable: before death, activity in a
particular frequency called the gamma band more than doubled in power compared to when the
animals were awake.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/head­quarters/2013/aug/12/dying­brains­conscious­experience 1/2
1/16/2017 Dying brains: will our last hurrah be an explosion of conscious experience? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian

These results are interesting because this pattern of brain activity is hauntingly familiar. For many
years, gamma oscillations have been suggested as a hallmark of consciousness in the human
brain. When we're consciously aware of a stimulus or recall a memory, waves of activity in the
gamma band pass back and forth between the front and back of the brain. Could the rats have
been in a similar conscious state immediately before death?

The short answer is that we don't know because correlation isn't the same as causation. As
tempting as it is to draw a link between these surges in neural activity and consciousness, we face
two barriers in doing so.

The first problem is that we don't know whether rats experience consciousness in the same way
we do – or at all – so we don't know what this activity profile means. Second, even if rats are
conscious, we can't conclude from their brain activity alone that these bursts of activity reflect
consciousness. To do so would be to assume that gamma activity is exclusively associated with
consciousness (it isn't), and to fall prey to a logical fallacy known as reverse inference. Borjigin
and colleagues are careful to avoid this trap – at no point in their paper do they argue that their
rats experienced NDEs.

Still, just why the brain should put on such a show immediately before death is a mystery. Does it
reflect an attempt to make sense of highly unusual internal signals? Is it a coping mechanism for
stress? The researchers were careful to rule out pain as an explanation for their findings – they
found the same bursts of activity when death was induced painlessly using carbon dioxide rather
than cardiac arrest.

To answer these questions we will probably need to run similar studies in humans. One approach
would be to record EEG in patients during death. Would you volunteer for such a study on your
deathbed? Another approach may be to induce similar bursts of gamma activity in people while
they are awake and test for heightened levels of consciousness. As Cardiff University
neuroscientist Dr Dave McGonigle puts it, "Seeing if NDEs can be triggered by neurostimulation,
using experiments that induce increased gamma synchrony in humans, might represent a way to
go beyond correlation to causation."

Of course, those of us who were children of the 80s can think of an even more pioneering
approach. Like ocean explorers nearing the edge of the world, might it be possible to one day
bring people to the brink of death and back again? Dancing with death while doing neuroscience
could reveal the ultimate insight into what lies immediately before the Big Sleep.

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Topics
Neuroscience Psychology

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