Ah, life - that thing where you're born and then get slightly bigger,
fall in love with a person or fishing, maybe make some more little people
and then, before you know it, it's time for the next part.
Death, dying - the inevitable demise of our being.
Now there's an eclectic range of ways you could die.
It's quite commonly heart disease or cancer, but equally,
you could join the 600-ish yearly victims of autoerotic asphyxiation.
(I don't know you.)
No matter how you die, at some point you'll experience clinical death,
which is sort of like life,
but just without breathing or blood circulation.
In other words, it's the beginning of the passage
from this life into that other bit.
But for most people, death isn't completely instantaneous.
So what can modern science tell us about the experience
of those very final moments? What does it feel like to die?
Now people in the last stage of dying are usually pretty unresponsive.
So we normally imagine that the experience of death is dull
- a sleepy, unconscious, fade out from life.
But some experiments tell a very different story.
In 2013, scientists at the University of Michigan gathered a bunch
of literal lab rats and measured their brain activity whilst they... well...
died.
But during this process, something very interesting happened.
After the rats experienced cardiac arrest with no heartbeat or breath,
their brains showed a surge of global activity with levels of low gamma waves
that were more synchronised across the brain than in the rat's
normal waking states. And incredibly,
this specific type of brain activity has been linked
to people's conscious perception in previous studies.
In other less boring words, these rats
might have been experiencing something between clinical death
and full-on brain death, which doesn't mean 'rat heaven',
it just means, you know, something.
I'm sorry?
What?
Yeah.
I can't rule it out, Greg.
This experiment massively challenged the assumption
that the brain is inactive during death. On the contrary, it seemed that
before lasting unconsciousness might be a period of heightened consciousness.
And it raised the question;
Now most humans have brains that are larger and more complex than rat brains.
But a very interesting experiment conducted at Imperial College London
in 2018 did shed some light on what dying might feel like for human beings.
Scientists wanted to investigate similarities between two very different phenomena.
On the one hand, near-death experiences or 'NDEs'
- the hallucinations experienced by around 20% of people
who have been resuscitated following clinical death.
On the other; DMT trips - the hallucinations provoked by
a pretty hardcore psychedelic drug.
So the scientists administered a dose of DMT
to test subjects who found themselves promptly and legally off their faces.
Then, once they'd returned to reality, the scientists had them describe their experiences
using a checklist commonly used to evaluate near-death experiences,
and they were shocked to see an incredible amount of commonalities.
Both NDE and DMT experiences included sensations like 'transcendence of time
and space' and 'oneness with nearby objects and people'.
The experience of almost dying, as it turned out,
was strikingly similar to a powerful hallucinogenic.
When we consider death, we think of it as a grim and boring process.
But science asks, 'what if it's psychedelic?'
I'm joined by Dr Chris Timmermann, who led the research at Imperial [College].
Dr Timmermann; what can this experiment tell us about death?
I think the the main sort of lesson I think of the research
is that we can find death actually in life, in life experiences.
What we know now is that there appears to be a surge of electrical activity.
These gamma waves appear to be quite pronounced,
and those may be responsible for these near-death experiences.
There's also specific regions in the brain,
like what we call the medial temporal lobes
- areas that are in charge of memory, dreaming and so on, even learning,
which might be related also to these experiences.
In a way, our brains are somehow simulating a form of reality.
In terms of NDEs, I read it was around 20% of people
who have been pronounced clinically dead and come back, report them.
Could it be that some people are remembering and these and everyone
does have an experience like this or could they actually be quite rare?
It is a strong possibility that there is a lack of recollection
because of different reasons. So we see in our experience
with the psychedelic DMT, when we give them high doses,
there is a part of the experience that is forgotten as well.
What I think is going on there is that the experience is so novel.
It's so what we call 'ineffable' or difficult to put into words.
And therefore, when the experience itself transcends this ability
to put things into language, we are also having a hard time recalling it.
It could also be that, you know, some people just don't experience that.
What further research from here could help our understanding of death?
It's very interesting what's happening these days with brain scans
and how we can decipher what is happening in the brain and
how that traces back to experience.
So you have scans that are performed on people
in which you can reproduce if they're viewing a movie.
What kind of movie are they viewing? So it's feasible that
at some point our brain imaging techniques are so advanced
that we can mind read people, so that we get closer
to understanding what are the brain mechanisms that underpin
these very extraordinary and unusual experiences.
Thank you so much, Dr Timmermann.
If you wouldn't mind just taking me back up?
Sure.
Thank you.
Lovely.
We're actually we're trying to get this commissioned into a series...
we want to get it on the telly.
The science of death is a pretty murky landscape,
but what we do know paints a surprisingly optimistic picture.
For instance, we know that people who have had near-death experiences
often report feelings of peacefulness and serenity
and show a long lasting reduction in the stress associated with death.
We also know that NDEs are overwhelmingly described as pain free,
meaning that that heightened consciousness we might experience
as we die is also likely to be painless and, you know,
maybe a little bit fun.
Research also implies that people tend to lose their senses in a specific order.
First, hunger and thirst, then speech and vision.
Hearing and touch seem to last the longest,
meaning that many people may be able to hand feel their loved ones
in their final moments, even when they appear unresponsive.
And one recent brain scan of a dying epilepsy patient
showed activity related to memory recall and dreaming,
leading to speculation that there might even be some truth
to your life 'flashing before your eyes'.
Finally, we know from these experiments that the experience
of death could involve heightened, possibly hallucinatory consciousness.
One last psychedelic journey before the 'nothing times'.
In a society like ours in which we tend to negate death
and try to put it under the rug and really don't want to see death.
I think this is one of the big lessons
that psychedelic research may be able to tell us is;
how could we incorporate death into our lives?
Ultimately, we are all going to die.
I'll die, Greg's going to die,
you'll die,
pigeon - that just died.
But these experiments show that the transition between life
and death could be far more experiential, emotional,
and even psychedelic than we might expect.
We're hardwired as animals to fear our demise,
but understanding death more deeply gives us reason to chill out a bit.
When you think about it, those last moments might not be scary at all.
They're just part of an inevitable, probably not too painful
and potentially psychedelic journey between this and...