A Dying Man's Brain Waves Were Recorded. They Looked Like Memory.

In 2016, an 87-year-old man arrived at Vancouver General Hospital after a fall, developed seizures and died mid-EEG scan. The machine kept running. Nobody planned what happened next.

In the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped, his brain waves shifted into patterns resembling those seen during dreaming, memory recall and meditation. Gamma waves, the fast oscillations linked to memory retrieval, took up a larger share of his remaining brain activity. The researchers speculated that the brain might be replaying life memories.

The paper, published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience by a team including Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu in Estonia, describes a patient who had surgery for bleeding between his skull and brain, then began having seizures. Doctors attached an EEG to monitor them. He had signed a do-not-resuscitate order.

The case wasn't published until six years after his death. The researchers spent that time looking for a second case and never found one. Ajmal Zemmar, the neurosurgeon who led the project, has said he was uneasy drawing conclusions from a single patient whose brain was already injured, swollen and seizing. A 2023 study from the University of Michigan later caught a similar gamma surge in two of four dying patients, and couldn't say what it meant either.

One patient. One accidental recording. Brain activity that looks, structurally, like a highlight reel, running past the moment the heart gave out. Whether that constitutes a memory, an experience, or just a dying brain cycling through its most-used patterns is a question this data cannot answer.

Read the full story at The Guardian, February 23, 2022

Hot Take: Generations of ghost stories assumed something lingers after the heart stops. The EEG agreed, for about 30 seconds.