Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain
blog.frontiersin.org
blog.frontiersin.org
I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.
uncritical supposition
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.8135...
The linked paper is, of course, not necessarily super valuable from a scientific perspective. After all, n=1 and we're talking about somebody with traumatic brain injuries who has been administrated lots of psychoactive drugs. Not a typical healthy brain. But, I found it fascinating. There is some speculation but I would call it reasoned and restrained.
The specific journals you refer to in the wikipedia article have dropped in popularity, but this particular one hasn't. Frontiers is a huge family of journals. Some are good, some are excellent, some not so good. I wouldn't call any of them predatory though. And even if there was controversy in 2015, 7 years can be a very long time in publication contexts.
One thing that is interesting about Frontiers is that they encourage open reviews (i.e. the review is public and accompanies the paper). This is pretty far from predatory journal behaviour.
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2014/10/07-worlds-largest...
"Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events. "
Is it established that dreaming is near-random memory access? I thought the whole process of dreaming is quite far from being understood, so wouldn't it be a stretch to call it near-random, when in reality there might be pattern, but just one we do not understand yet?
I’ve had deeply odd dreams, where I’ve been told things I have no way of knowing. I’ve also had dreams where I’m near certain I was communicating with a being that was not merely a figment of my imagination. I’ve had many lucid dreams. Once I had a dream that was so lucid it felt more real than being awake. Either there is something unknown going on or I have perfect recall and am factorially more creative when asleep than awake.
I’m well aware of the standard explanation for these phenomena and its sometimes only barely plausible.
Have you ever taken DMT? Not to imply that what you experienced was physiologically related to the drug. It’s just that being “more real” than reality is often how intense psychedelic experiences are described.
At the same time there's plenty of evidence that everyone's brain is a lot weirder and deeper than what we're consciously aware of. I think the truth just has to lie somewhere a lot spookier than dreams being essentially meaningless.
For more information see e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/124807/has-a-jo...
Not everything in Frontiers is trash. However, that's absolutely the first assumption to make.
I had a sudden cardiac arrest (Ventricular Fibrillation). I felt dizzy and oriented for a few seconds (5?) after my heart stopped pumping blood and then I passed out. There was no life-flashing-before-my-eyes, no tunnels of light, just sudden dizziness and disorientation and then nothing. The next thing I remember was coming round in hospital.
If you get hit right, the ~0.25-0.5 seconds prior and after to that hit do not exist for you. They are gone. You'll never know how you were hit or what you were doing, your eyes will just change instantly from "looking ahead" to "looking to the side/up" and you'll have to adjust very quickly to this new reality, despite the fact that the transition was instantaneous for you.
One guy used to joke that if you ever said something really dumb, you'd have about 1-2 seconds to hit the person who heard it so you could continue as though it never happened. Should tell you something about the kind of person you might find at a boxing gym.
> there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you
and why not? Maybe sometimes there is. and maybe the value of that is more for the living than the dead, but imo the point was that there's an argument they can still hear you. Will they remember it later? That's kind of a non-sequitor question if they're in the midst of dying.
But so are hiccups, who knows...
Near death experiences do not happen to everyone who dies and is resuscitated. Supposedly, according to Wikipedia [1], it only happens to 10-20% of people. If someone is critically ill, it happens to 17% of those people.
But, it does happen to some people who go in to cardiac arrest.
"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.
My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop.
My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me.
No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was.
That I ever hurt someone.
That I ever killed someone.
Everything is as it was before me.
All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”
https://adrianvstheworld.com/2021/10/05/midnight-mass-and-th...
And, another moving monologue, this one's a spoiler so heads up: https://www.reddit.com/r/HauntingOfHillHouse/comments/pxw74y...
Either way, this show hit me unexpectedly. One of my favorite "deep watches" in a long time.
The delivery of the dialogue by Hamish Linklater is also something to behold.
Interestingly enough, although my wife shares the same beliefs as me in terms of religion and God, the stories that resonate most with her from that show were the evocative ones about God and heaven. She told me that the science-based ones barely register to her at all, and almost not at all on an emotional level. As I heard the other character describe her idea of heaven, I too feel the pull of those descriptions. There's a part of me that agrees with the character when he says, after listening to her speech, wiping away tears, "I really hope you're right."
There is something in us that makes us yearn for more than the short lives we have now (hardly anybody would choose to die if they had good health under normal circumstances), so these do resonate with us more than a purely materialistic world view, which has ostensibly left people with lack of contentment and sense of purpose.
I'm reminded of the prototypical Alan Watts lectures. He might be out of fashion at the moment, but maybe his work will one day again be a little flicker in the cave for us to reach for, down the line.
Just because there is brain activity doesn't mean there is consciousness. A 10 week old fetus has brain activity. But it is not anything we'd call conscious. If your heart stops or you've stopped breathing, then it's highly unlikely you are conscious. But if it helps one cope with a loved one's death, perhaps there is no harm in letting them believe the deceased could hear your final goodbyes.
Edit: liars liars pants on fire. It has been done before.
https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much...
Not exactly connected to the discussion, but still worth noting that brain activity sensing can be difficult! (And it also makes me smile, thinking about a fishmonger's prized frozen fish undergoing a brain scan).
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
I mean if I'm dying I'd like people to take an EEG recording of me to shine some light to science and neurology. It seemed super off to me in many ways... thanks for showing that it really is.
Ironically the movie's star Natalie Wood (of West Side Story and Miracle on 34th Street) dies toward the end of the filming (drowning). The movie was a little choppy because they released it without a few intended scenes.
> When an 87-year-old patient developed epilepsy, Dr Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu, Estonia and colleagues used continuous electroencephalography (EEG) 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.
https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much...
> Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain and discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.
>NOW, a study published to Frontiers brings new insight into a possible organizational role of the brain during death and suggests an explanation for vivid life recall in near-death experiences.
The record has already been done, but now the scientists have found what the -already recorded- data could tell/show.
> a new study published to 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.
"This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever."
Here’s a link to one of the Drier et al. papers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322479687_Terminal_...
https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much...
I expect that in the majority of deaths, nobody is making any effort whatsoever to save the dying person.
Then again how did it all start? Causality is completely broken, when it comes to these things.
I think some Buddhist concepts, like reincarnation and duality, can be interpreted as perspectives on this.
It does increase my sense of compassion for life in general, and I try to lean into that.
I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?
“They’re at work. They're Russians.”
"Is it normal for them to eat without talking to one another?”
“This is their job. They get 20 minutes to eat.”
“Yeah, but they never smile. Are they happy?”
Are the Russians happy? Is anyone happy? Can one ever truly be said to be happy?
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.
“Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.”
In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.
Think of any time when you've been unconscious, like when under anesthesia, or fainting, or knocked out for some other reason. You experience everything leading up to the event that knocks you out, but the only reason you can recall any of it is because you did eventually wake up and regain consciousness. Your experience of your current self now is only because a moment from now you can look back and remember it. Eventually though, you will die, and you won't be able to look back and remember, and for you, it's as if nothing ever happened. So given that we will all die some day, how is it we even have conscious experience at all? I might die 5 minutes from now, or 5 days, or 5 decades from now, but isn't all the same?
edit: another user commented and said this was "logically unsound 20th century positivism". Let me direct you to this quote ca 300BC from Epicurus:
> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
Is it neural activity that underlies all experience? Or is it neural activity which filters it?
Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.
Or perhaps the universe is just snapshots of infinite patterns locked in permanent static states and this entire progression of time, physics, etc is just an illusion created by the sub-process of consciousness that creates dynamic transitions from one state to another.
It's probably my inability to perceive the concept of infinity that my mind thinks about such things, either way we will probably never know.
I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the briefest moment, I was struck by the idea that in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, other versions of me failed to grab the rail and tumbled to their death. It was quite an odd moment, I didn't worry about the fact that I had nearly fallen, I just felt bad for all the ones that did.
The question doesn't make any sense.
If I smash you in the head with a hammer and you have brain damage which changes your personality, makes it so you can't access some memories, and can't control your body properly.. we accept that as literal brain damage- we have broke the machine (our brain) in some regard.
Everyone accepts the reality of that situation.
But when you die (i.e., your brain is completely shut off and non-functioning), we ask what is it experiencing? What does it feel like? It's literally a nonsensical question.
Your brain isn't active to experience anything from its senses, which in turn are probably not functioning to send any signals either.
"Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1]
In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem
[1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
It's not even a good question unless they first prove consciousness can exist outside its physical support, AKA the immortal soul.
This is a different argument. It's not necessarily saying consciousness is distinct from matter. The panpsychist view (not sure if Chalmers is in this camp) is that consciousness is a fundamental property to all matter, from photons to the human brain. (This isn't to say a photon has experiences as a human does, but rather the complex human consciousness is derived from a much simpler forms of consciousness).
This is different from saying ""where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". This assumes consciousness is an emergent property, rather than a fundamental one. The "car" is emergent from the right arrangement of "car parts". Rather, the question "where is the mass/charge of the car when you take away all its pieces" is a better analogy, because the car mass/charge is derived from the mass of the car part's mass/charge.
>there's not enough evidence to test scientifically.
This aligns exactly with what Chalmers says, that explaining subjective experiences is the "hard" problem precisely because we don't have a way to gather data. Gathering data is, almost by definition, an objective measure and can't give much insight into subjective experience. To a certain extent, if feels like defining or measuring subjective experience can't be looked at with traditional scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, that can also lead to a bunch of quackery.
The closest survivable analog, in my opinion, is the "sleep" you experience when under something like sodium thiopental. When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant, from your own perspective. A bit jarring to lose hours or days like that. I assume death is similar but without the waking up part.
Regular old sleep doesn't involve that level of unconsciousness.
That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.
It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
Indeed it does. This is why I try to remind myself that this kind of thinking can only torment me when I'm alive, and I should stop wasting time. Especially at 2am, which of course is when I have these kinds of thoughts to begin with.
My dad and I used to talk about this and decided that we lived forever, as a practical matter. "Before" and "after" just speculation.
It couldn't be pure black and emptiness, for example, because we no longer exist to experience it.
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov "
Dealing with the reality we do know, I comfort myself with the idea that, and this sounds cheesy, all is one. Not in some hippy, pantheistic way. More that our experience of ourselves as separate from anything else is itself an illusion. There are no things, not nothing but "no things". Everything is a giant process, everything interpenetrates everything else, nothing exists independent from anything else.
This is a somewhat Buddhist view. I'm describing emptiness in a way (the Buddhist term not nothingness or some sort of nihilistic viewpoint). It seems like a totally logical way to see things and, for me at least, comforting. It's all one process and it's all relational. It's relations all the way down. One Buddhist teacher I like put it this way. "All of reality is a vibrating verb rather than a bunch of concrete nouns".
So back to your point, this is tantamount to being part of that "infinite stream of energy" as you put it perhaps.
And specious stuff that says "No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel", not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.Einstein: "I told you I was done with physics! Let me rest in peace already!"
Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".
Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.
Must be a wild ride.
Or replaying their greatest embarrassments. That's what my brain will be doing -- why change the habit of a lifetime?
As I get older I suspect more and more that humans are not adapted for atheism. Even us hard atheists tell each other stories of chemicals and stuff and cosmos and infinity. I have an ongoing conversation with my wife on whether we'll raise our future children Catholic or not. I think we might. The lure of those stories, the grandiosity of those narratives, the imagery and ritual... Those are just buttons that I don't know if an atheistic upbringing could press. I'm not saying it's not possible... Would a reverential trip to the Grand Canyon, a late night summer trip to Amboyd Crater, fulfill the need for awe that a child has as she's growing up? If I could will it I would have her completely skip the existential terror that I've contended with throughout my life, but of course, she would be her own person and her own mind, regardless of my plans.
Just like religious parents can have atheists kids, atheist parents can have agnostic or religious children. Indoctrinating them from childhood is taking their freedom of choice and choosing for them.
I definitely value freedom of thought above ritual. That's an aspect of the decision I had set aside as a conceit in order to allow myself to entertain it at all. I too was raised (loosely) Catholic, and a lot of my initial pain around morality and life stemmed from my literal interpretation of those teachings.
I hope that some sort of ongoing comparative discussion of religion and the purpose it can serve would help a child make their own best conclusions. The way I've been thinking of it at the moment is, the tension at the heart of this, is "Would 'depriving' someone of those rituals be more harmful than helpful?" I'm leaning toward it being negligible, but exposing them to ritual might bring an individual closer to a healthy path of spirituality on their own terms. I would definitely keep the aspect of autonomy front and center if I did introduce my child to religion. "They talked about Jesus today. Do you want to sit with me and find out what other people think of him?"
"Thanks I'm cured", right? I didn't believe it would help when I first learned the technique. I heard it from a researcher who studied death anxiety in Tibetan Buddhists. He found that their culture makes it an overwhelming priority to be constantly conscious of one's mortality. He found that this imperative was inculcated from the very earliest age, and he found an unusually high correspondence in those beliefs to symptoms of anxiety. It was startling to him, as to me, because he thought the whole idea of Buddhism was "go with the flow dude, everything is gonna be alright", but in the teachings emphasized in the culture, it morphs into some sort of spiritual specter always haunting the waking lives of these people. It resonated with me, because Western existential philosophy also makes death-awareness an ideal to strive for, with the concomitant devil's deal of constant anxiety.
He concluded that extinguishing or minimizing the idea of one's mortality ends up freeing one from the existential terror it can cause. I remember being in my living room cleaning as I listened to the report, and I stopped in my tracks and put the vacuum down. "There's no fucking way that works."
It WORKS. It started working almost right away. If the thought of dying came up I just would grab the thread and shake it and say to myself, "Ok, so what? You have to wash the dishes man." I don't think I've lost any of my cynicism or me-ness or critical faculties in the ensuing years. That constant death anxiety is almost completely gone now, except for the most inopportune lulls before sleep or in idleness. I keep coming back to it. "Oh my God. I'm going to die one day. No. No. No. Please no... Hey! Who fucking cares?! Think about your puppy, look how cute she is laying there so innocent. Think about renewing your car registration. Literally everything is more important than that insignificantly tiny moment in the future. You're ok right now."
I hope that helps.
The answer may vary by religion.
Am I crazy, or is it something you can get used to, like practicing lucid dreams?
The hallucinations were only terrifying as a kid, worse as I didn't know what sleep paralysis was for the first 10 years of having it, and no one would believe it wasn't "just a dream". The hallucinations are terrifying again now that I have a kid of my own, only when they are part of it...
Worse than the hallucinations are when my ears start buzzing... it's so loud - it hurts.
I used to say, in jest, that it will kill me in my sleep (except I'll be awake and suffering) when I'm elderly. As I'm getting older, it seems like a likely outcome.
"Goodnight"
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
> “As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members,” he said.
If you always saw yourself as a victim, if you wallowed in the trauma and abuse that life gave you, then your final moments are likely spent remembering all that trauma and how shitty and unfair your life was, and convincing yourself you’re better off dead and gone far away from this world. A crude way to die.
If anything, any sensation or thought requires energy. Experiencing 1000x or 100000x more sensations in the same space of time takes 1000x/100000x amount of energy, and it's not like your dying organism has hidden last reservoir of energy to power your brain activity.
Did I comfort you?
The poster wrote that he got assaulted by a football player, fell on the ground, and somehow hurt his head.
Then he met a girl, they got married after two years and then had a child. Another two years later they had another child. He also had a great job, and bought a house, where he lived with his wife and family for like 10 years.
One day he was sitting on the couch, looked at a lamp, and noticed that the lamp did not look right. The perspective was off. He stared at the lamp for three days. Then he realized that is not a real lamp. Nothing was real.
Then he woke up, still laying on the ground where he had hurt his head 15 minutes ago.
There is still energy at the moment of death (e.g., your ATP doesn't instantaneously disappear), meaning for a few brief instances, there is still energy to perceive and during these instances, the subjective experience of time may differ from normal day-to-day experience. It's not to say perception actually goes on forever, but the subjective experience of time feels like it does (or, at least changes our normal perception of time).
my guess is you slowly transition to simple machine with sense inputs and outputs until it all shuts down.
Death could be like that too. A flood of signals you're unfamiliar with and a lack of signals you're used to having.
It probably depends on how much warning you have and your willingness / readiness to pass as well.
Kind of like if you're really tired and can't wait to fall asleep vs. scared and trying to keep yourself awake.
There are other possibilities besides memory recall. It sounds a little bit like falling asleep, where there might be some thoughts, some stillness (meditation) and some dreaming.
Some people are optimists.
Anyway, as a (not 100%) materialist, I feel uneasy when I think about death. The older I am the more uneasy I feel. Of course there is no way to cheat death, but I'm looking forward to training myself to accept the inevitable before it is too late.
Or maybe there IS life after death, or certain kind of existence. I'm also looking forward to that too.
I wonder what the adaptive benefits of near-death flashbacks are. Perhaps as a way to give last-ditch motivation.
We have plenty of accounts of what it's like to have a heart stop. Thank defibrillators for that. Of course, the whole ordeal may not be accurately committed to memory.
For example, if humans exploded like a bomb when we died the way some insects do to protect their colony, that might be selected for or against by evolution. Or if somehow eating the deceased's heart or brain actually transferred their strength or memories to the consumer, as some cultures believed. But no, death by old age just doesn't interest evolution.
I can see how brains could evolve to do status checks and respond to survivable events. But, I don't see how it could evolve to have a different response to non-survivable events.
What I'm getting at is, do folks who survive report that they had a nice experience? If not, how did brains get a different mechanism for/response to not-survivable experiences?
More likely, these are random accesses of vivid memories (the ones that have been strongly imprinted on the brain) and these could be both happy or sad ones.
Autosuggestion is a powerful phenomenon. They're convinced they'll see the welcome party, and they will if their death is not sudden.
"After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the “Do-Not- Resiscitate[sic!] (DNR)” status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."
Via reddit.com: How vile of the liberulz to mis-characterize Trump's new social network like that -- please don't do that here...
[Edit: and yes, downvoted within 2 minutes... How. Surprising]