In 2016, an 87-year-old epilepsy patient was under treatment in a hospital in Canada. Doctors had equipped an EEG to examine brain activity. During this time, the patient had a cardiac arrest and unfortunately, died. However, for the first time, the EEG recorded human brain activity during death.
The findings are not conclusive but are quite interesting. They suggest that a person may recall life, or play a “flashback” of life just before dying. The neurophysiology of brain activity after cardiac arrest and during near-death experiences is not well understood. It was generally assumed that brain activity would gradually decline. However, it seems to increase substantially before seceding.
In this particular case, an increase of absolute power in Gamma activity is observed, and then it seems to decrease after the suppression of bilateral hemispheric responses. Gamma waves are associated with cognitive functioning, learning, memory, and information processing. It has been hypothesized that the brain may be replaying memory with an increase in oscillatory activity.
Oscillatory activity means rhythmic, repetitive, and spontaneous electrical activity. Generally, neural oscillations are associated with information processing of perception, consciousness, and memory during waking, dreaming, and meditation.
Bilateral hemisphere simply means two halves or hemispheres of the brain separated by a deep fissure. So, the brain is bilateral.
Apart from an increase in Gamma activity, an intricate interplay between the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Theta rhythms was observed. Alpha-band oscillations are the dominant band in the human brain and have an inhibitory function on cortical areas that are not in use, similar to the Delta-band. Theta rhythms also play a critical role in memory recall, especially in verbal and special memory tasks.
While this study produced measures of live brain activity during death in a human, similar Gamma activity in experimental studies with rats has been observed. A significant rise in cortical adenosine, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, GABA, glutamate, and aspartate was also seen (Borjigin et al., 2013; Li et al., 2015). This suggests that the brain may have a common set of biological responses during death across species. As far as this study is concerned, it is a single case from an epilepsy patient who had suffered from injury, seizures, and swelling, further complicating the interpretation.
What do we know about Near-death Experiences (NDE)?
Near-death experiences (hereafter mentioned as NDE) are conscious perceptual experiences, including self-related emotional, spiritual, and mystical experiences, occurring in close encounters with death or non-life-threatening situations. These include life reviews, out-of-body experiences, entering a bright tunnel of light, feeling peace and joy, becoming one with the universe, meeting spirits, and entering an unearthly realm.
For centuries, accounts of NDE are collected from all over the world, across cultures including religion, the visual arts, and fiction literature. The concept of NDE seems un-scientific and superstitious, but the commonality in the themes indicates a possibility of a biological basis.
William James (1902) defined NDE as - noetic (somehow comprehensible, or meaningful), ineffable (or indescribable post-hoc), transient and passive (happen to one, rather than being manifest through an agency). Most interestingly, Greyson (1997, 2003) found that NDE has a profound impact on the subject and is associated with decreased suicidal ideations, and post-traumatic and spiritual growth. Nelson (2011) built followed up with Greyson and proposed a physiological mechanism for NDEs. He said,
“Near-death experiences work in the brain as a confluence of low blood flow to the eyes, fight-or-flight reactions and the triggering of REM consciousness. Physiologically, that’s it” (p.218).
Most NDE reports show common motifs - God archetype or relatives. Many Americans and English report returning for love or unfinished work. Indians, on the other hand, often report being incorrectly processed by a giant bureaucracy (Mauro, 1992). Nahm (2009) found examples of ‘mistaken’ deaths and ‘correction’ cases among the Roman NDE reports.
A personal anecdote:
One of my father’s friends once told us about a near-death experience with his mother. He is a retired IPS officer and he had been a “scientific and rational” mind, one who did not believe in myths, mysticism, and superstitions. His mother was quite old and she died of old age. As it happens, she was being taken for cremation, she suddenly “woke” up. She was brought back and everyone asked her “Amma, what did you see?”
She described her experience quite vividly. She said,
“I saw that few young men are holding my arms and leading me through a corridor of what seems like a huge building. I have been made to stand in a queue made by people who seem to have been brought there like me. The queue is standing before a desk on which an old man with a long white beard is sitting. He seems to be noting something down in a giant register. When my turn came, he looked at me and immediately called for the men who first brought me here. He screamed at them - “Hey! Why have you brought her here now?! Her time has yet not come!” - and then I felt as if someone pushed me very hard and I came falling. Then I woke up”.
[I remind you of not drawing any conclusion.]
Paul Brusser (2015) tried to explain that there is no mind-activity uncorrelated to brain activity. A person who has survived an NDE may enjoy the experience as a brief moment of bliss. But, anything after that we cannot know.
An Indian psychological perspective
The notion of reincarnation must be revisited. We know, that the same individual never comes back to another life. It is, however, the Atman that is eternal. In our material lives, we accumulate Samskaras or impressions of our actions and thoughts. To break free of the circle of life and death or to achieve Moksha, one must clean off all samskaras that one has accumulated in the present and previous lives.
The original state of the Atman is Brahman, the universal consciousness. How can the Atman, with its grossness return to its original state Brahman, that is shunya?
Now, memory has a cognitive and emotional value. Having a memory of a response to certain stimuli helps us maintain a sense of reference, which further facilitates adaptation. This certainly has both cognitive and emotional implications. From information processing to interpersonal communication, memory serves a crucial role in life.
But memory also serves as a psychological “time” (not to be confused with physical time). It is our memory that continuously upgrades our life stories. To put this in perspective, if we forgot upon waking up, and we have no memory of what happened a day ago, we would simply be beginning from scratch as if we were just born.
Combined with a sense of time is the sense of reference. When we say, for instance, that we failed miserably today, the question could be - miserable in reference to ‘what’? It would be a bit clear that both time, reference, and memory help us build Ahankara or ego (not to be confused by Freud’s ego). Ahankara is conceived as the root of our identity.
It could be possible that the Atman may take away these memories from our physical self. And, consequently, return to life, in a different body. The rituals, in the Hindu tradition, that are associated with death, direct towards the same idea. According to the Garuda Purana, the significance of the 13 days of mourning is that the Atman takes time to understand that it must let go of all material attachments. For this reason, symbolic ceremonies are performed for 13 days to make this process of entanglement easier for the Atman.
101-102. The relatives turn away with averted faces leaving the dead body on the ground, like a lump of wood or earth, but righteousness goes with him.
The wealth disappears from the house and the relatives from the cremation ground. The good and evil karma he has made goes with him. (Garuda Purana).
A Psychoanalytical parallel
Freud explained the death instinct or ‘Thanatos’ not as an aggressive instinct against others. Instead, this instinct turns in on itself. The drive is to annihilate oneself and to return to a state of nothingness (Rycroft, 1995). In Civilization and Its Discontent (1930), Freud writes about dissolving life back to a pure-organic state, literally to ‘dissolve life back into primeval, inorganic state’.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud referred to an alternative force, a compulsion to repeat. He gives an example of his grandson Ernest, who plays a game of disappearance of his mother. The child manages the departure of his mother in a game that involves disappearance and return, with the pain of loss rewarded by the joy of return. Here, Freud offered his understanding of an organism’s ultimate desire - a return to the ‘quiescence of the inorganic world’.
A metaphysical explanation of near-death experiences and “why”, if at all, we recall our life during death, could be highly subjective. Different knowledge traditions will have different views. However, as long as we do not know for certain, we can look at this subject from a traditional perspective.
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