Life May Actually Flash Before Your Eyes When You Die, So That’s Terrifying
Haven't we suffered enough?
Groundbreaking new research suggests that our lives may in fact flash before our eyes when when we die. How haunting!
Apparently, it’s very rare to have concrete data on what the human brain goes through when a person dies. “You can’t plan this,” says Dr Ajmal Zemmar, lead author of Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience study told Insider. “No healthy human is gonna go and have an [brain activity test] EEG before they die, and in no sick patient are we going to know when they’re gonna die to record these signals.”
But when an 87-year-old man passed away while getting an electroencephalogram (EEG) at a Canadian hospital, scientists were able to observe his brain activity as he died.
The EEG reportedly showed that 15 seconds before the patient’s heart stopped beating, he experienced a series of brainwaves associated with concentration, dreaming, meditating, memory retrieval, and flashbacks.
“It is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state,” the study reads, suggesting the man’s life may well have flashed before his eyes.
“Surprisingly, after the heart stops pumping blood into the brain, these oscillations keep going,” said Zemmar. “So that was extremely surprising for us to see.”
The good news is this is just one study. The late patient in question was suffering from a haemorrhage, swelling, and seizures, so the brain activity they experienced isn’t really generalisable to all humans.
But it’s still very unsettling. As Hyperallergic points out, the concept of ‘near-death experiences’ and ‘life flashing before your eyes’ has had a grip on our collective imagination forever — a trope so ubiquitous that it’s been invoked in everything from the 16th century painting Ascent Of The Blessed to the animated sitcom Family Guy.
Have a look at the full study here.