Brain Has Electrical Surge Just Before Death

In the moments before death, the human brain surges with activity, which some researchers believe may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs).

Seven patients dying from critical illnesses recently were studied by doctors at George Washington University. Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.

Writing in the October issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, the doctors theorize that the brain surges may be tied to widely reported near-death experiences which typically involve spiritual or religious attributes.

According to Discovery News:

At first, doctors thought the electrical surges picked up by electroencephalographs were caused by other machines or cell phones in the rooms of dying patients, lead author Lakhmir Chawla told Discovery News.

"We thought 'Hey, that was odd. What was that?'" Chawla said. "We thought there was a cell phone or a machine on in the room that created this anomaly. But then we started removing things, turning off cell phones and machines, and we saw it was still happening."

The doctors believe they are seeing the brain's neurons discharge as they lose oxygen from lack of blood pressure.

"All the neurons are connected together and when they lose oxygen, their ability to maintain electrical potential goes away," Chawla said. "I think when people lose all their blood flow, their neurons all fire in very close proximity and you get a big domino effect. We think this could explain the spike."

Brain researcher Kevin Nelson at the University of Kentucky, who studies near-death experiences, said it's well known that when the brain is abruptly deprived of blood flow it gives off a burst of high voltage energy. "It's unlikely with conventional brain wave recordings during death that they're going to see something that hasn't been seen already." he said.

Chawla and colleagues want to follow up their case study with a larger pool of patients outfitted with more sophisticated brain activity sensors.

Click here for the Discovery News article.

A Stroke of Insight

Twenty minutes may be asking a lot, but this talk by brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor offers astounding spiritual insights about who we are.

Click here for a previous post on Dr. Taylor, with more information about her journey.

Consciousness is More Than Our Brains

As anyone who’s a steady reader of this blog knows, there are a lot of current scientific studies trying to explain how we think and how we view the world. The most recent one below is a good example ~ do religious people have a less active anterior cingulated cortex, and if so, what does that mean?

I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with many of these neuroscientific studies. Either the researchers themselves are becoming more extreme in what they believe the evidence shows, or the news articles are sensationalizing the findings.

Likely some of both.

That’s why I’m interested in a new book by Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California. In Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness, he clearly disputes that our brains can be understood in their entirety by a bunch of laboratory tests.

Here are some quotes from Noë that I lifted from a recent interview in Salon.com. They give you a good idea of where he’s coming from:

I don't reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That's just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I'm attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn't happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It's more like dance than it is like digestion.

* * * * *

I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain. People like Sam Harris, who worry about the irrationality of religious customs and practices, are right to be concerned. I agree that religion can be dangerous. But I don't think neuroscience is the way to understand it at all.

* * * * *

Instead of asking how the brain makes us conscious, we should ask, How does the brain support the kind of involvement with the world in which our consciousness consists? This is what the best neuroscientists do. The brain is not the author of our experience. If we want to understand the role of the brain, we should ask, How does the brain enable us to interact with and keep track of the world as we do? What makes a certain pattern of brain activity a conscious perceptual experience has nothing to do with the cells themselves, or with the way they are firing, but rather with the way the cells' activity is responsive to and helps us regulate our engagement with the world around us.

Click here for the entire Salon.com interview.
Photo at left is Alva Noë

A Lesson of Oneness

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist whose stroke left her with abilities mystics have sought for millennia. She wants people to “step into the consciousness” of their brains’ right hemispheres and experience the phenomenal oneness that awaits us there.

Dr. Taylor is getting a lot of press these days due to release of her book My Stroke of Insight. Here’s a recent New York Times article. Here’s video from her recent appearance on Oprah, and here’s a video of her speech to the prestigious Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

Because of her work at Harvard’s brain research center, Dr. Taylor was well aware that the left half of our brains gives us logic, time, ego, analysis and other structural faculties. The right side gives us creativity, empathy and things of a more intuitive nature. In 1996, Dr. Taylor, at 37, suffered a stroke that incapacitated parts of her brain’s left hemisphere. She found she could experience the right brain without impediment.

“I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she writes. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.” She saw her body’s atoms and molecules blend with the space around her and realized the whole world and all of its creatures were parts of the same shimmering energy. “My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air.”

It took her eight years to recover, but the knowledge the stroke provided has remained. Her driving motivation these days is to make sure people know that they can choose to live more spiritual and peaceful lives with the help of their right brains.

Of particular interest to me is her message that organized religion is a far cry from the intensely beautiful spirituality she has experienced. The daughter of an Episcopal minister, she says, “Religion is just a story that the left brain tells the right brain.”

“Nirvana exists right now,” she says. “There’s no doubt that it’s a beautiful state and that we can get there.”