A remarkable research in the neuroscience has provided some scientific basis for our long held beliefs about the near-death experiences.
Many survivors narrate near-death experience as going through a tunnel in the extraterrestrial land adorned with
flower valley, intense white light, meeting with long deceased loved ones,
talking to them, appearance of angels and much more.
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| Near death survivors narrate passing through a tunnel Image courtsey: iStock.com |
The scientists have wondered if brain activity in a near-death state can explain the near-death experience? What actually
happens in the brain immediately after the death?
The
general belief is that during a cardiac arrest the brain activity goes down or
stops, so there seems no connection between near-death experience and brain
activity.
Different brain waves associated with the brain activity in different states
Image courtesy: Art and Science of Meditation
But this belief challenges our understanding of brain and so far there is no
clear scientific evidence of the neuro-physiological activity in brain during
near-death state after a cardiac arrest, until now.
In
a first of its kind study the neuroscientist at
the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor performed a systematic study of the neurophysiology of the
dying brain after a cardiac arrest in rats.
The scientists found that all the animals studied invariably displayed a short-lived but
highly synchronized and heightened brain activity in the first 30 seconds of cardiac arrest. This suggests that “the
mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of
heightened conscious processing at near-death”.
The study has been published in the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. The original article can be accessed here http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/08/1308285110.abstract
So
how does this finding relate with the near-death experience? The researchers
reasoned that near-death experience is nothing but increased brain activity and
conscious processing, which could possibly be the source of highly vivid and lucid
conscious experiences during clinical death after the blood stops flowing to
the brain.
In
the state of cardiac arrest there is progressive decrease of oxygen as well as
of glucose, the main ingredients required for brain to survive and function, which
induces characteristic conscious processing in brain resulting in heightened brain
activity. It could be equated with the survival instinct of a dying brain.
Although
more detailed studies are needed to fully understand this phenomenon, the study
does provide “a scientific framework to explain the highly lucid and
realer-than-real mental experiences reported by near-death survivors”.
