Let’s set the scene for your upcoming death.
You are lying in a bed surrounded by family and friends.
The lights are dimmed and your breathing is shallow.
The people around you know it’s almost time.
You might seem unconscious to them, but in your mind all kinds of things are happening.
Images of childhood come back to you.
You’re selling lemonade on the street outside your house.
Then you’re a teenager holding hands with the person who was your first love.
You fast forward to adulthood and you’re saying “I do” to the woman who was your
first wife.
A decade later and you’re doing the same routine with your second wife.
And then the scene fades to black, except there’s a light ahead of you.
Death is calling and you walk forward.
Is that how things happen?
Or is there nothing during those final few minutes?
Having your life flash before your eyes thing might seem a little too romantic for some.
Maybe we don’t get this last picture show right before death, and all we’re left with
is the lights going out.
That’s it, game over, no great trip through history with the grim reaper acting as tour
guide.
In 2017 a neurologist named Dr. Cameron Shaw shed some light on those final 30 seconds
before the final bell goes.
He explained that before we die, right before, there will be blood loss to the brain.
Unless there is some massive injury and its lights out immediately, before we die we are
going to fade out because of this lack of blood to the brain.
When that happens the vision narrows, so right before death we may well experience something
like going down a tunnel.
That’s perhaps why a lot of people who have died and come back have talked about tunnels.
He added, though, that he doesn’t believe in out of body experiences, only that loss
of consciousness might feel like a narrowing of vision and then blackout.
This doctor was asked what happens during those final 30 seconds, and he replied that
we slowly shut down and the bits that shut down first are the parts of the brain that
make us, us.
That’s our sense of self, or perhaps our humor.
After that the parts of the brain that shut down are the bits where we store memories.
You are then still alive for a few seconds, but the doctor said you are pretty much in
a vegetative state.
This is how he explained it in an interview, “For all intents and purposes you could
say they're dead because they don't have a consciousness or an awareness of their surroundings.
But if these basal structures are intact they'll still breath and have a pulse.”
Still, people report seeing all kinds of things near-death.
Some researchers at Hadassah University in Jerusalem after interviewing people who had
near-death experiences concluded that indeed some people have their lives flash before
their eyes.
They said that the life might not flash in any type of sequence, though, only lots of
muddled memories have flashed through the brains of the almost dead.
One woman explained it like this, “It all happened at once, or some experiences within
my near-death experience were going on at the same time as others, though my human mind
separated them into different events.”
Then we might look at the story of Dr. Rajiv Parti, a man who is the former chief of anesthesiology
at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital in California.
He was having an operation for his cancer when things went terribly wrong.
He didn’t die, but was close.
He’s since written about what he saw during those seconds he was leaving the planet.
He wrote, “My father led me down the tunnel and toward the Light, and we looked at it
together, its intensity oddly soothing.
I moved forward and then began to walk rapidly in its direction, pulled by a powerful sense
of love emanating from its radiance.
My father let go of my hand, and I kept moving forward.”
That doesn’t sound too bad at all, and then he said he entered another realm where he
met archangels of the Bible.
He said they took him to a place where he saw this, “The sweet smell of grass and
roses made me almost delirious with pleasure.
A crystal-clear stream of water cut through the meadow, and the air off the distant mountains
was blowing gently.”
He said he felt pure love in this new land, and he was ready to leave the old land of
his former life.
That sounds like a massive hallucination, perhaps close to something someone might see
on the substance DMT.
Psychology Today wrote a story about near-death experiences, but like the doctor we introduced
at the start of this show the writer said a lack of oxygen to the brain might only feel
like a tunnel and then you are gone.
Tripping in a land of angels and green pastures should not happen, so why do so many people
say they see such things.
If the brain is dying we shouldn’t really be seeing majestic things.
It should be the opposite.
This is where DMT comes in, full name N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.
This stuff is sometimes called the “spirit molecule”, and if you watch Joe Rogan you’ll
know he and a lot of other people while erring on the side of caution believe this stuff
can open a doorway to another kind of reality.
DMT is everywhere, in plants and in animals.
It’s illegal in most countries when it’s made into a powerful drug, but in other countries
it’s taken as part of ceremonies.
If you’ve listened to what people say about a thick soup called Ayahusaca is like, it’s
nothing short of unbelievable.
DMT is part of that drink that sends people into another reality.
If you know anything about DMT you’ll know a lot of people say we humans can produce
it all on our own, with some people saying it’s responsible for those great dreams
we have.
Others say as we die we might produce a lot of it.
Indeed, scientists at the University of Michigan said the mammal brain can make its own DMT.
In a now famous documentary called “DMT: The Spirit Molecule” a clinical psychiatrist
called Rick Strassman said upon death DMT can be secreted by the brain’s pineal gland,
and we might have a mystical experience.
This is all quite controversial, but it might explain angels, roses and eternal love.
A bunch of researchers at the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London
wanted to get to grips with such mystical experiences before death.
They began a study.
The people on that study had all had a near-death experience.
In the study they took DMT and were then asked to compare their trip to their near dying.
It turned out there were similarities.
One of the researchers concluded, “Our findings show a striking similarity between the types
of experiences people are having when they take DMT and people who have reported a near-death
experience.”
Scientists are still trying to figure this out, and while some are sure rats create DMT
in the pineal gland, others are not so sure humans can do it.
More research needs to be done.
Another scientist who has studied near-death experiences did say, though, that the experience
is often transformative.
People who have taken ayahuasca or plain DMT have said the same thing.
This is what he wrote about people who have had near-death experiences, and it really
does sound like someone who’s just come back from Peru following a 5-day ayahuasca
marathon.
He wrote this about near-death experiences, “A person's values and attitude toward life
are completely transformed.
People often become less materialistic and more altruistic, less self-oriented and more
compassionate.
They often feel a new sense of purpose, and their relationships become more authentic
and intimate.
They report becoming more sensitive to beauty and more appreciative of everyday things.”
He went on to say that a lot of people do have those mystical experiences before death
and indeed they might be a massive hallucination.
But he said DMT experiences are not nearly as transformative as near-death trips.
There are a lot of skeptics out there, but some people believe that consciousness is
part of the universe at large, and not something just in us.
Perhaps when we die we feel this connection to everything else.
Perhaps DMT helps us to realize this connection.
The jury is still out, but it’s not something we think should be laughed at.
So, we might trip out before death and if we survive it might change us forever.
We found plenty of stories online in which people said they had had wonderful experiences
at near-death.
They were very willing to go, they said, it was peaceful.
Some described it as “beautiful”, so if you believe them we all have something to
look forward to.
Science is still in the dark about this, and while a dying brain should not give us these
amazing experiences time and again people have said that’s exactly what happened to
them.
We went to a Reddit thread where people talked about what happened to them during their near-death
experiences.
Here are a few of the replies: “To me it felt a bit like slipping into
a dream.
Everything in the dream feels and looks bright and colorful, and feels like it lasts hours,
but when I came back, I had only been gone for less than 3 minutes.
The subject of the dream, or anything about it I didn't remember.
I knew none of it made sense, but it felt peaceful, almost uplifting.”
“There's no excitement or struggle or really any awareness of what's going on.
You just kinda fade and slip away.
Everything's kinda insubstantial, like it's there but not.
You sort of know something's not quite right, but somehow that's not important.”
“It felt as though I was sinking into a deep dark pool of water.
Everything around me was black and the world we live in kept getting smaller and smaller.
It was like I was sinking slowly into a world of unknown.
Sound began to act as though it was farther and farther away.
In a strange way, I felt at peace.”
While some scientists say our dying brains should be slowly becoming more inactive, one
scientist said this to the BBC, “A lot of people thought that the brain after clinical
death was inactive or hypoactive, with less activity than the waking state, and we show
that is definitely not the case.
If anything, it is much more active during the dying process than even with the waking
state.”
But more research has shown that some people don’t have those illuminating experiences
and during their near-death experience all they got was pretty much nothing.
Another doctor who was interviewed by Live Science said some people who have come back
from the dead said they saw the people in the room.
He said, “They'll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having
awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise
not be known to them.”
He said we still don’t know exactly what goes on with consciousness as we die, but
there is enough evidence out there to suggest more than fading to black might take place.
So, to conclude about what happens in the mind before we die, it seems a lot of people
do enter another kind of realm and some feel at peace.
It seems some people do see the past, memories of their life, while others don’t think
about much at all.
We can only ask those who have come close, of course, because the dead tend to be quite
tight-lipped.
By the way, we thought we’d add something to the end of this show because it’s relevant
and it’s just so fascinating.
We might also make a show about this in the future.
Did you know that doctors of late have started putting people into suspended animation?
Like, keeping them suspended in death and then bringing them back.
This recently happened at the Maryland School of Medicine in the U.S., and the doctors called
it “emergency preservation resuscitation.”
What they did is cooled a person down by replacing some of their blood with an ice-cold salt
solution.
This prevents oxygen from getting to the brain, but the person can be brought back to life.
The reason the doctors would do this is so they can perform a medical procedure on someone.
Let’s say that a person has been shot or stabbed and they go into cardiac arrest.
They have lost lots of blood and will die in about five minutes, so that means surgeons
have to work very fast.
But with the suspended animation technique they might get two hours to work on that person.
They are technically quite dead, but are brought back.
We’d love to know if anything was going on in the patient’s mind, but unfortunately
this is all new and their thoughts weren’t in the articles we read about this.
The US Food and Drug Administration has just given this the green light and those surgeons
don’t even need to get a person’s consent before they do it.
Do you know anyone who’s had a near-death experience or have you had one?
What do you make of what we have said in this show?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video What Happens When You Die?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.