Near-death experience explained!

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. 

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”.