Ever had a near-death experience? I have.
Like many in their twenties, my friends and I were thrill-seekers. Rock climbing, cliff jumping, zip lining and many other semi-dangerous pursuits filled our days with adrenalin-soaked experiences I couldn’t possibly reenact today. Advancing age and improved judgement precludes it now.
But our greatest passion back in the day was white water kayaking. Blessed with proximity to Class II to IV rapids, we rushed into the sport after watching a documentary on a group of expert "yakers” running the Dudh Kosi river. The waterway, originating from the high-altitude areas of Mount Everest, offers the steepest sustained angle of descent available on earth.
We didn’t start our kayaking adventures in Nepal, although we wanted to. Being fast learners, we nonetheless chose a challenging river much, much closer. One that actually served as a practice course for United States Olympic kayaking hopefuls and offering Class III to IV rapids.
After numerous successful runs down the river, navigating four-foot-high standing waves, however, disaster struck. Swamped in a cross-current in the blink of an eye, I found myself upside down, underwater and pinned on an enormous boulder. Submerged and struggling to break free, I could barely hear my own garbled screams through the sound of the rushing water. I can still remember the acrid, iron taste of the river water in my mouth.
After what seemed like an eternity, I not only saw, but relived a series of discreet, personally important scenes from my life, in chronological order, spanning from my youth to the life-threatening predicament of the moment. The last thing I remember thinking: What a waste to end up on the bottom of a river. And it was at that exact moment, for no conceivable reason, that I was torn free of my trap and returned to the surface via my life jacket. My friend — a trained firefighter and paramedic, had pulled into an eddy, frantically trying to figure out how to help. Spotting me down river, he hollered from a distance, “You were under a long time. I thought you were gone.”
Medscape Psychiatry recently reported a case study that may help explain near death experiences like mine, and potentially, other phenomena commonly observed by physicians and loved ones caring for the dying, as well as experiences described by dying patients, themselves.
For the very first time, the brain activity of a dying person has been captured and recorded when an 87-year-old man suffered fatal cardiac arrest while undergoing an electroencephalogram (EEG) procedure as a part of his treatment for epilepsy following a traumatic brain injury. The recording revealed a brain wave pattern like those seen when memories are activated.
Although the study, published online February 22 in the Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience reports data from a single subject, experts say that the recording confirms the likelihood that, as we die, our lives actually may flash before our eyes.
"The same neurophysiological activity patterns that occur in our brains when we dream, remember, meditate, concentrate — these same patterns also appear just before we die," study investigator Ajmal Zemmar, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, told Medscape Medical News.
The minute long EEG recording, captured at the exact point when blood flow to the brain stopped, revealed a noticeable increase in gamma oscillations, brain waves produced by higher cognitive functions, such as conscious perception and memory flashbacks.
Researchers also noted changes in alpha, theta, delta, and beta wave activity just prior to and after the cardiac arrest, and that changes in one type of wave seemed to have induced changes in other waves. That coordinated rhythm suggests that the recording reveals more than simply neurons firing as they die.
Although the data was obtained in 2016, the researchers purposely delayed publishing it, hoping to locate similar recordings in other individuals in order to corroborate the findings. That their 5-year search yielded no results illustrates just how difficult a study like this is to conduct, Zemmar noted.
"We're trying to figure out how to do this in a predictable way but obtaining datasets like this is going to be challenging," he said.
Although Zemmar didn’t locate any other recordings of activity in the dying brains of other human patients, he did find a similar study conducted in 2013 that used laboratory rats hooked up to EEGs and subjected to experimentally-induced cardiac arrest.
As observed in the current research, investigators in the rat study reported a surge of brain activity in rats just before and immediately after the cardiac event. And, as in the current case study, similar changes in both the high- and low-frequency brain waves were also documented.
Commenting on the new study for Medscape Medical News, George Mashour, MD, PhD, professor and chair of anesthesiology and professor of neurosurgery and pharmacology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said "There was a surge of higher-frequency activity and there was coherence across different parts of the brain." He added, "That suggests that what we found in the rigorous controlled setting of a laboratory actually translates to humans who are undergoing the clinical process of dying."
What remains unclear is whether this brain activity explains the near-death experiences described in the literature, which include "life recall" of memories, Mashour said.
"This higher frequency surge that's happening around the time of death, is that correlated with experiencing something like this near-death experience? Or is it just a neural feature that can just as easily happen in an unconscious brain?" he asked.
With amazing scientists and cutting-edge technological advances, we may soon have those answers.
RELATED: Found the G Spot? Researchers Just Discovered the “C Spot” in Women’s Brain Structure
RELATED: It’s a MAD, MAD World