Life really does f lash before your eyes as you die

And this breakthrough in our understanding could help prevent patients waking up during surgery

What happens when you die? Down the years, there have been lots of accounts of people who, after a heart attack or near drowning, report seeing bright lights or hearing the voices of recently departed loved ones.

I’ve even met people who claim that during life-saving surgery they began to separate from their bodies, floating above and looking down at themselves lying on the operating table.

The fact that many people from around the world report remarkably similar experiences suggests there is something real going on — one popular explanation is that people who have come back from the brink of death have seen a glimpse of the afterlife, the place where our consciousness goes when we die.

Personally, I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I have always been curious about these near-death reports.

In fact, a few years ago I worked on a TV documentary where we planned to wire up a volunteer, who was on the brink of dying, and see what was happening in her brain when she died.

The documentary was never made because our volunteer, having initially been enthusiastic, decided at the last moment she didn’t want to be filmed.

So I was moved to see the results of a recent project where researchers had managed to do something similar.

The study was carried out by neurologists at the Center for Consciousness Science at the University of Michigan and published in the journal Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences.

The researchers approached this differently from the way we had; they looked through hospital records for patients who had died in the neuro-intensive care unit at the University of Michigan while their brains were being monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG).

The researchers managed to find the medical records of four patients who’d had major heart attacks and arrived at hospital comatose and unresponsive; they had been fitted with EEGS as part of tests to see if there was any chance of recovery.

Once it was decided that the patients were beyond medical help, doctors (with the families’ permission) turned off the ventilators that were keeping them alive. What was amazing was that seconds after the ventilators were switched off, EEG recordings from two of the patients showed a surge in gamma-wave activity. this was a surprise because gamma waves are a form of fast brain activity and are normally associated with being conscious and alert.

This surge lasted for several minutes and, at times, was intense — ‘crazy high’, according to one of the researchers. there was no such change in the brains of the other two patients who had died.

Even more surprisingly, this burst of gamma-wave activity occurred in parts of the brain that are linked with dreaming and having visual hallucinations. One suggestion is that a sudden fall in oxygen supply to the patients’ brains, which occurred when the ventilators were turned off, disabled some of the brain’s natural ‘braking systems’. this, in turn, allowed the activation of dormant visions and long-lost memories, at least for a little time.

This would certainly fit in with the experiences of people who have survived near drowning and who often say things like, ‘my whole life flashed before my eyes’.

This research is part of a wider project to try to understand the mystery of consciousness, and how to detect it using brain monitors. It would be useful, for example, while patients are having surgery to know if they are fully unconscious or not. there have been cases where patients have become conscious during an operation but have been unable to tell anyone they are awake because they have also been given a muscle relaxant drug, which stops them speaking or waving their arms around.

At the moment, there is no reliable way of telling if a patient on the operating table is aware of their surroundings, which is why research like this, into what is going on in the brain as it slips from consciousness to unconsciousness and back again, is so important.

It also explains something that surprised me when my own father died nearly 20 years ago. towards the end, even though he was rarely conscious of his surroundings, he would sing random songs from his youth with great enthusiasm.

At the time, it seemed odd. I now realise that perhaps it was because gamma waves were being released in his fading brain, triggering lastminute surges of energy and, I like to think, releasing happy memories of a life well lived.