The brain is assumed to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest. However, animal models of cardiac and respiratory arrest demonstrate a surge of gamma oscillations and functional connectivity…
Patient One was aged 24 when she collapsed. By the time the paramedics arrived, she had been unconscious for over ten minutes and her heart had already stopped. She was rushed to the University of Michigan E/R, but to no avail—the defibrillator proved ineffective, and nothing could counter the massive swelling in her brain. After three days in a deep coma, at the request of her family, the nurses turned off her oxygen and then removed the breathing tube from her throat. But to the shock of the medical staff, her brain started to register intense synchronized hyperactivity even though life support had been terminated. Patient One was clinically dead, yet her brain surged with gamma waves and high-frequency electrical signals lit up areas that were inactive while she had been comatose. For over six minutes after her ventilator had been removed, her brain activity continued to peak, especially in the heavy traffic zones that neuroscientists identify as the seat of conscious activity. Synchronization dampened and then surged, quelled and then roared back again for whole minutes, stimulating high levels of neural feedback. Parts of her brain were suddenly in vigorous communication with each other, above all in the regions associated with memory, cognition, and vivid dreams[i]. After external stimuli had ceased to register, new memories were being formed from the debris of sentience.
… a rapid and marked surge of gamma power, surge of cross-frequency coupling of gamma waves with slower oscillations and increased interhemispheric functional and directed connectivity in gamma bands. High-frequency oscillations paralleled the activation of beta/gamma cross-frequency coupling within the somatosensory cortices… surges of functional and directed connectivity at multiple frequency bands within the posterior cortical "hot zone," a region postulated to be critical for conscious processing.
It is said that on the deathbed, our senses fade away one at a time. The first one to go is our subjective sense of time (hearing is apparently the last[ii]). Time must mean both our sense of presence in worldly time and also the perception of an inner, particular time. Moments and events that were separated in life by hours or years might follow successively, rearranged in a strange order or superimposed like a double exposure, connected by chains of influence exclusive to the state of near-death. Set adrift, our last vestiges move through these memorial shells and constellations as if we were shattered apart and every piece lost at sea. And wouldn’t this mortal ocean also include wholly imaginary events, as if the mind were improvising under duress, drawing on desires and dreams the same way as it used modes of memory and deductive reasoning? But it is hard to gather evidence. There is only one witness, who never disputes the facts. In fact, there are no facts.
Let us imagine a few things then, based on the scant biographical information provided by The Guardian’s article. Patient One had three children. As she dies, she watches them grow older. She sees their faces change and their personas develop. She watches them walk to school. She sees them stand up from a table (or a desk or a swimming pool or a carousel). She sees herself comb their hair and shout at them; she sees one light a cigarette and another clutch a toy. She sees them graduate school or ride a bus, apply for a job or get out of prison; she follows them as they get their hearts broken and break others’ hearts. She sees a pair of pajamas and sunlight on an eyebrow. She sees the steam rising from a plate of sprouts, and she also she sees her children die, though they outlive her. She sees what she wishes they will become, what they are, what they are not, and what they must not and will assuredly be. She sees herself looking on from a vast distance which is also closer than a fly sitting on a hand. She breathes the same breath her children inhale and exhale long after her tongue goes dry, the room and its foreign sob, her chest stills, the clock is at six minutes and seventeen seconds after the machines have been shut off. She has seen everything that will transpire, as if she had lived it but also as she had dreamed it. She remembers wanting children, and that first desire for them, different from the reality of their birth and subsequent lives, hers and theirs, is also given extension and breadth. It exists alongside the children she had, following like a shadow, this fantasy of a young girl’s, along with countless other thoughts from the most ridiculous to the very capital of pain. The dead are impertinent. We are forced to remember them as if they had given us no other choice. In the room, cold machines record the cacophony of Patient One’s brain by oscilloscope and graph, charting the fluctuations in the wave amplitude of an EEG.
This gamma activity was stimulated by global hypoxia and surged further as cardiac conditions deteriorated in the dying patients. These data demonstrate that the surge of gamma power and connectivity observed in animal models of cardiac arrest can be observed in select patients during the process of dying.
The facts in the case of Patient One suggest that not everyone undergoes this kind of power surge after the cessation of vital signs. And it seems accidental that the data was gathered at all, that the doctors and nurses were in the right place at the right time to observe a rage for life which manifested itself far longer than usual. But who is to say that this same frenzy does not occur in every single death? After all, its duration in the living world is not the same as its duration for the subject. For the subject, time has a far different meaning and cannot be calculated in the same way that changes in the magnetic field measure brain activity.
But all of this remains speculative. When such hypotheses are tested, each person will do so alone and take their decisive conclusions with them. We therefore add one more conjecture, serving as a coda:
If Patient One’s near-death was as rich as to encompass every actual and unrealized possibility in her life, then it must also have included the events of her real death. In this vast panorama of things which both occurred and did not, each a point on the spectrum of near-death, each one bearing the same gravity and the same distance from the center to this spectrum, the final meeting with Death takes its place as merely another element on the general plane, having no more and no less importance to Patient One than a lover she didn’t meet, an address she never found, or a dog she decided not to pet. She died then, as she had died a million times differently, in that state which is closer to death, at age twenty-four, leaving behind three children. Though she was already dead, her death had been hidden from her by the very processes which had revitalized her brain as a result of her death.
[i] Dr Jimo Borjigin, who has made an in-depth study of Patient One, calls this efflux of brain activity after cardiac arrest and during the near-death experience ‘a biological paradox.’ The short paragraphs in italics in my post is from the abstract of a paper written by her and several of her colleagues. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37126719/ and https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1308285110
[ii] For example: “The researchers monitored the brain's response to those tones using EEG and found that some dying patients responded similarly to the young, healthy controls -- even when they were hours away from death. "We were able to identify specific cognitive processes from the neuro-typical participants as well as the hospice patients," says Lawrence Ward, a professor in the department of psychology at UBC. "We had to look very carefully at the individual control participants' data, to see if each one of them showed a particular type of brain response before we felt confident that the unresponsive patient's brain reacted similarly." (’Hearing persists at end of life’, Science Daily, July 8, 2020)
O Martin. Your writing is so dense that I must really concentrate. It’s worth it. As Terry died in a short furious burst, our experience and perception of time was a main thing. One moment, mentally floating down a Long slow lazy river and the next a raging torrent as our minds bent to the will of a rough death. Rage for life against the …I have been with a couple of people who died quietly, at peace, in bed. The peculiarities of each death are amazing. As for the brain activity, why not. We are meat computers made of electricity and protein. Death rituals lasts for so long in many places because of the brain activity, no?
I still have a hard time with Etant Donnes.
Reading this at the start of my 74th rotation around sun and enjoying your imaginative rendering of her consciousness's final narratives. I expect mine will also be filled with regrets, good-byes, and questions. Cheers!