Study explaining what happens immediately after a person dies is taking the world by a storm

Death is a huge enigma and mystery to every individual walking on earth. People have talked about it, written hordes of fiction about it but nobody has ever been able to correctly reflect what happens to a person when they go through that experience. This is because no one stays to live the tale after they have gone through "death." For the first time, a group of scientists have some solid evidence regarding what happens when the body is leaving the physical realm, per a recently published study. They were able to get the evidence by performing an EEG test on a man who was dying. For 15 minutes after his body stopped functioning, his brain activity continued, which gave researchers a clue about what might happen to humans when they go through such an experience.

As per NHS, EEG is a test where sensors are attached to a person's scalp to get a recording of their brain activity. This test is done to analyze many neurological issues. One of those is epilepsy. Medical professionals use the test to determine what kind of epilepsy an individual is suffering from and thereafter decide on a treatment plan. Researchers while finding out about the experience of death came up with the idea of doing this EEG test on a person dying, to understand what exactly happens in an individual's brain when they are leaving the world. As expected it wasn't easy to find a "subject" for such a test, but they somehow landed on an 87-year-old man who suffered from epilepsy.

The man died from a heart attack and the EEG test recorded his brain activity for 15 minutes after his death. They noted that there was an increase in brain activity, a phenomenon known as "gamma oscillations." WebMD shares that gamma oscillations are connected to high levels of thought and focus. Researchers believe that such a high level of activity during those 15 minutes suggests that a person's life flashes before their eyes in that span.

“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,” said Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, who organized the study published in the journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience. “Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha, and beta oscillations.” 

"Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences," Dr. Ajmal Zemmar, explained. “These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.” Ethically organ donation should occur only when a person is fully dead. This research raises queries about the process put in place to declare someone dead. 

This pattern has not been noted for the first time in living beings. The same brain activity has been found in rats in their last moments. This implies that there is a conventional response that the brain executes during those times. The next step is to conduct this test with more subjects to analyze the validity of the result as shared by Zemmar with CBS News. Zemmar's objective regarding the research is, “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”