Imagine for a moment that you can hear noises and people around you — but when you try to respond,
nothing happens. Your arms and legs don’t respond. Your muscles refuse
to contract when you tell them to. You’re conscious, but you can’t open your eyes.
Sounds come in through strange filters — distorted and warped,
as if they’ve been run through synthesizers. And none of them seem to be connected, or related
to each other. It’s like you’re dreaming, and yet...not. You’re aware, but not fully conscious.
So finally you give up...and find that at the moment you do, you are at peace. You drift through
comforting familiar scenes of forests, exploring caves and interacting with nature and animals.
What’s happened? Well, you have just been in a medically induced coma.
Claire Wineland experienced these sensations in 2015, when she was literally put on ice
after she contracted an infection called blood sepsis following a routine surgery for cystic
fibrosis. For an entire week, she lived in a dream world, immersed in a wilderness of
memories, dream imagery and distorted sensory input from the outside world.
And then she came back to tell the tale. She even made Youtube videos about her experiences.
She died in 2018 due to complications from surgery,
but not before sharing her near death experiences and the transformative change it had on her.
Not that I want to experience this anytime soon, but one of the things I have tried to imagine
is what it may have been like for her. What will it be like
when I die? And I don’t mean the afterlife, or heaven or the other place, or anything like that.
I mean the actual feelings, emotions, vision and sounds that I would experience just before
I left this universe. I would be surprised if you haven’t thought about this too.
I imagine that it may be something like was Claire experienced.
What does science have to say about this? Can experiments and other evidence
give us a clue about a process that we know is coming for each and every one of us?
Could learning about it alleviate some of our fears about death and dying, which is probably
mostly due to the unknown. What if we could make it a little bit more known?
Join me as we try figure out what this may be like…coming up right now!
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Claire’s story sounds remarkably similar to others who have also had near-death experiences.
Some commonalities include out-of-body experiences, positive emotions,
celestial landscapes, and meeting deceased persons.
They describe floating above their bodies, spending time in beautiful places,
meeting lost loved ones, feelings of euphoria.
why should the collective experiences of so many people sound so similar?
Are people’s consciousness really leaving their bodies as they are dying,
or is all this a hallucination happening inside the brain?
Well, most people who have experienced this don’t describe it as hallucinations
but, as real life experiences.
To test the idea of people leaving their bodies and floating above it,
researchers placed images on high shelves in hospital rooms, which were not visible unless you were
on a ladder close to the ceiling. They then interviewed hundreds of cardiac arrest survivors
who had been revived in those rooms. But none reported seeing the images.
One clue about what might be happening, is that these out of body experiences
sound similar to the journeys people have described while taking psychedelic drugs
like, psylocybin, LSD, or DMT in which people also describe traveling to otherworldly realms,
encountering godlike beings, and discovering a greater reality beyond their everyday experiences.
Could there be a connection?
A 2015 study by Neuroscientists Dieguez and his coauthors
concluded that the “disembodied” experience is due to disturbances in a part of the brain
called the temporo-parietal cortex, an area that some of these drugs can affect.
This is the part of the brain that gives us a sense of self, and perception of our body.
If damaged, or stimulated, it can create an out-of-body experience.
These researchers propose that a network of brain activities can account for the mechanism
of out-of-body sensations, and even mystical experiences.
According to a study done in the mid 90’s, by Rick Strassman,
a professor of psychiatry at University of New Mexico, he found that people had
near-death and mystical experiences following injection of N, N-dimethyltryptamine or DMT.
DMT is a powerful psychedelic drug that is also known as the “spirt” molecule.
Strassman’s study showed that more than half the people injected with this drug
had religious experiences, typically interacting with non-human beings in a disembodied state.
Strassman says that at near death, the body produces natural DMT in the pineal gland. This
could be another reason that people can have out of body experiences near death.
On the other hand, could some of these experiences be due to natural processes
in a dying brain? Researchers have found that when the brain is dying, the body releases endorphins.
These are the natural “feel good” drugs that the body produces typically in times
of intense physical pain or suffering. The body does this naturally to suppress pain.
Long distance runners have described this as a “runner’s high.”
Researchers theorize that when someone is dying,
it is these same endorphins that produce a sensation of peacefulness and contentment,
not unlike what the people who have undergone near death experiences report.
It’s known too much carbon dioxide in a dying brain can affect your vision, making it feel like
you are in a tunnel. In addition, it is also known that a lack of oxygen can cause hallucinations.
Combine this with a rush of endorphins triggering a sense of contentment and peace,
and this combination may explain much of what people seem to experience.
But the data is incomplete because even people who weren’t lacking oxygen
have described visions of being in heaven.
If certain drugs induce similar sensations, is it evidence that all this is happening in our brain?
Some scientists argue that these scientific explanations
don’t explain the full range of experiences that people have,
so we should not conclude that all out of body experiences have a scientific explanation.
But is this what it’s like to die for everyone? Perhaps not.
The precise experience may depend on how you die.
If you die abruptly, by some sort of severe accident, then it could be just lights-out,
with no such sensations at all. A 2016 paper by Allison Yow describes sudden cardiac arrest
as a shutdown across all bodily systems: the heart stops pumping, the lungs stop breathing,
and electrical activity in the brain also drops to zero, indicating no neuronal activity.
But what you’ve got a little more time than that. Say you’re trapped at the bottom of
the ocean and your air tank has run out. What happens in this kind of scenario?
A 2006 paper by Peter Lindholm shows that hypoxia, or lack of oxygen in the brain,
usually quickly renders a person unconscious when the pressure of
oxygen in their blood drops to around 25–30 mmHg. Normal pressure is about 100. Around
the same time, you suffer cardiac arrest. Your heart stops beating.
Death, in this case, may be much like falling asleep. In a 2015 article in The Independent,
one near-death survivor describes his experience as taking a nap.
A short nap with no dream, you wake up and it feels like you've been sleeping a long time,
when in reality it's only been about 15 minutes.
Few of us want to die suddenly. We want to die in a comfortable bed,
surrounded by our loved ones. This is called active dying.
What is that experience like? James Hallenbeck, who has extensive clinical experience with many
dying pateints, writes this in Palliative Care Perspectives, which is a guide on palliative
care for physicians, people tend to lose their senses and desires in a certain order.
“First hunger and then thirst are lost,” he says.
“Speech is lost next, followed by vision. The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.”
Could this mean that people can still hear us and feel our touch even though we think they are gone?
Neuroscientist Adrian Owen thinks so. In a 2017 article in The Guardian, he describes using
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to enable people in vegetative states to
communicate with loved ones, by thinking of certain types of scenes to indicate “yes,”
and other kinds of places to indicate “no,” which appeared to work in the cases that he studied.
In a state of ”active dying,” we say our goodbyes, breathe our last breath, but then what?
Could it be that we are still aware, even though we may look like we have passed away.
For a couple of minutes after your cerebral cortex stops working,
your pons, thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and medulla oblongata
may sing to one another a swan song of a dying consciousness.
Jimo Borjigin a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, described the neuroscience
behind this phenomenon in a 2013 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Borjigin and her research team anesthetized rats, then stopped their hearts. “Suddenly,
all the different regions of the brain became synchronized,” she says. The rats’
brains showed higher power in different frequency waves, and also what is known
as coherence—the electrical activity from different parts of the brain working together.
Borjigin’s team found that in the moments just before death, rodent brains experience a surge of
neuronal activity in the gamma-band range — along with theta-wave activity, which is associated with
working memory retrieval. These may be the neural correlates of “seeing your life flashing before
your eyes” — one last performance of the all-time greatest hits of your existence here on earth.
"A lot of cardiac-arrest survivors describe that during their unconscious period,
they have this amazing experience in their brain," Borjigin says. “They see lights
and then they describe the experience as more real than real life.”
The sudden release of neurochemicals might explain this feeling.
So where does this leave us? What is it really like to die? By most accounts,
the experience does not appear to be an unpleasant one. The brain appears to do everything it can to
help ease any pain and suffering you may have, and provide comforting stimuli to your senses.
One way of looking at death could be that it’s simply the inevitable end of a physical process,
like the silence after the last notes of a song. Or the end of an irreversible chemical reaction.
As far as neuroscience can tell, there’s no way for the brain to support consciousness
for a long period after it dies, any more
than your internet browser could keep running after you shut down your computer.
But what if consciousness doesn’t “run” on the brain, the same way that the websites you view on
your browser don’t run on your computer? What if that song continues to play out somehow, somewhere
else, like a radio station continues to play a song even if your radio is turned off. There’s
no scientific proof of this, but it remains a comforting — and for many, necessary — idea.
And sometimes, especially in times that are this stressful, maybe we just need to
be comforted by possibilities, than jarred by hard scientific evidence.
And then again, maybe there’s one more possibility. Perhaps at the very end
of everything, you may find that dying is like reaching the end of a beautiful dream...but just
not waking up…or if it comforts you, not waking up in your bed, but waking up at the radio station.
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joining them. I will see you in the next dream my friend.