(Image via forbes.com)

Volunteer Writer: Akshit Bagga

Email: abagga@umassd.edu

Recent research on the dying brain suggests that there could be much smaller boundaries between the existence and nonexistence of a human, setting new lines between life and death.

For several years, a neurology professor, Jimo Borjigin, from the University of Michigan, has wondered what happens to us when we die after reading about near-death experiences added to her curiosity about life after death. With this lens of near-death experiences, Borjigin embarked on a groundbreaking investigation into the neural activities of dying patients.

One of the initial investigations was done on Patient One. Patient One was a 24-year-old pregnant woman who died of cardiac arrest. In the year 2014, Patient One’s heart was halted by a disorder leading to irregular heartbeats. Despite efforts to revive her, she slipped into a coma and remained on life support until her last hours of life.

Professor Borjigin, armed with technologies, delved into the brain activities of Patient One during her transition from life to death. The prevailing belief was that oxygen ceases to reach the brain when someone is dying, prompting neural activity to go silent. However, contrary to all these beliefs, the brain of the dying person exhibited a surge in activity, where gamma waves, which cause the cognitive functions in the body to carry out tasks, rushed through the brain.

Overall, the areas in the brain responsible for consciousness and memory functions depicted increased activity. Opposite to the traditional expectations, neural activities in patient one didn’t black out; rather, they demonstrated a connectivity between near-death experiences, which teamed up with the person’s life experiences and self-disclosures.

Borjigin’s research indicated that death is not a sudden phenomenon, and a person’s life does not cease suddenly. With her research, Borjigin indicated that life to death is a transformative journey where the brain goes on an odyssey of its own once the heart stops pumping.

Research quests relating to life and death experiences involving the brain were long in the making. It is believed that researchers were diving into data believed to be as old as 30 to know more about the phenomena. Sam Parnia, who is an expert in near-death experiences and an accomplished resuscitation specialist, mentioned in the early years, “We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?”

While the results from Parnia’s research were ambiguous and unclear, Borjigin, with several colleagues, made one of the first investigations in this field around four decades later. They took a closer look at the electrical activity in Patient One’s brain after she was taken off life support and found the results for their research.

Speaking to representatives from The Guardian, Borjigin said, “I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg.” She continued, “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”

As research continues to understand the phenomena, scientists believe death is a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen supply to the brain ceases, cells start to break down, and normal electrical activity is disrupted. However, the organs and the brain do not fail right away. These leads provide scientists the direction to work on the possibility of returning a person to life by reviving the activities of organs in the body even after they die.

In 2011, a Japanese woman who died of an overdose and was found in a forest could be revived more than six hours later using advanced technology. Another case was in 2019 when a British woman who died of cardiac arrest in a snowstorm was revived hours later using medical technologies.

In the evolving saga of life and death, the journey to defy death using science as a tool continues. Relentless efforts are being fueled in this direction, which makes time the only barrier to overcome before science finds a way to avoid death.