The experience of life passing before our eyes has been reported for more than a century. In 1892, a Swiss geologist named Albert Heim fell off a cliff while climbing a mountain. In the account of his fall, he wrote that it was “as if I were on a distant stage and my whole life unfolded in numerous scenes.”
More recently, in July 2005, a young woman named Gill Hicks was sitting near one of the bombs that went off on the London Underground. In the minutes after the accident, she was on the verge of death where, as she describes it: “My life flashed before my eyes, flashing through every scene, every happy and sad moment, everything I’ve ever done, said or experienced”.
Although it has never been proven, people who have survived near-death experiences affirm that these experiences are true. And now scientists have proved them right.
The study. A team of scientists set out to measure the brain waves of an 87-year-old patient who had developed epilepsy. But during the neurological recording, he suffered a fatal heart attack, offering an unexpected recording of a dying brain. He revealed that in the 30 seconds before and after, the man’s brain waves followed the same patterns as dreams or memories. Brain activity of this kind could suggest that a final “memory of life” may occur in a person’s last moments.
So, will we be able to take a look back with our loved ones and other happy memories? Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, co-author of the study published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, explained that it was impossible to know. “If I were to jump into the philosophical realm, I would speculate that if the brain did a flash back, you would probably like to remind him of the good things, instead of the bad. But what is memorable would be different for each person,” she said.
As when dreaming or remembering. In the 30 seconds before the patient’s heart stopped supplying blood to the brain, their brain waves followed the same patterns as when we perform demanding, high-cognitive tasks, such as concentrating, dreaming, or remembering.
It continued like this 30 seconds after the patient’s heart had stopped beating, the point at which a patient is usually pronounced dead. “This could possibly be the last memory we’ve ever experienced, and it replays in our brain in the last few seconds.”
When does life end? The study also raises questions about when, exactly, life ends: when the heart stops beating or when the brain stops working. Dr. Zemmar and his team cautioned that broad conclusions cannot be drawn from a study of one person. The fact that the patient was epileptic, with a swollen and bleeding brain, further complicates matters.
But a 2013 study, conducted on healthy rats, may offer a clue. In that analysis, the US researchers reported high levels of brain waves at the time of death up to 30 seconds after the rats’ hearts had stopped beating, similar to the findings found in Dr. Zemmar’s epileptic patient.
Other studies. The “experience of reviewing life” has been very little studied. A handful of theories have been put forward, but they are understandably tentative and rather vague. For example, a group of Israeli researchers suggested in 2017 that events in our lives may exist as a continuum in our minds and may come to the fore under extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.
Another theory is that when we are close to death, our memories are suddenly “downloaded”, as if the contents of a container were thrown out. This could be related to “cortical disinhibition”, a breakdown of the brain’s regulatory processes, in highly stressful or dangerous situations, causing a “cascade” of mental impressions.
Something mystical. But the experiences reported by some people are usually calm and orderly, completely different from the kind of chaotic cascade of experiences associated with cortical disinhibition. And none of these theories explains how it is possible for such a large amount of information, in many cases, all the events of a person’s life, to manifest in a period of a few seconds. “I think there is something mystical and spiritual about this whole near-death experience,” Dr. Zemmar said. “And we scientists live to find out.”