People have been describing this phenomenon for millennia. In the 1998 action film Armageddon, Bruce Willis’s character sees memories of his daughter and wife a moment before dying in outer space. In the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, the character played by Tom Cruise leaps from a building and as he’s falling, he sees his childhood, his parents, a dog, and the women he’s loved throughout the years his life. The trope is so solidified it’s joked about in cartoons, like Family Guy, and used in movies like Babe: Pig in the City (Babe flees from a dog about to kill him). These accounts cross cultures and religions. They have also reported a hallucinatory and meditative state and a sense of transcendence and bliss. Research into these experiences has reported intense memory recall and a panoramic review of one’s life.
It comes back to us from people who have experienced near-death experiences, defined as when the brain has transitioned into preparing for death. This is the first time this has been proven in a human, although the concept looms large in our collective imagination. Similar brain oscillations occur during meditation and dreaming. It’s thought that these oscillatory patterns, and an increase in gamma waves, suggest memory recall (the gamma band decreases external interference, allowing for deep inward concentration like recalling memories). The EEG brain scan found an oscillatory brain wave pattern in which activity in the brain’s alpha, beta, and theta bands relatively decreased and activity in the gamma band relatively increased. “No healthy human is gonna go and have an EEG before they die, and in no sick patient are we going to know when they’re gonna die to record these signals.” “This is why it’s so rare, because you can’t plan this,” Ajmal Zemmar, one of the co-authors of the study, told Insider. When he unexpectedly died, the EEG machine kept running, providing the scientists a first-of-its-kind glimpse into the brain activity of a dying human. The scientists were originally conducting electroencephalography (EEG) scans on the patient to detect and treat seizures. The scan was conducted by an international team of 13 neuroscientists led by Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu in Estonia. The patient, whose name was kept private, suffered a heart attack, and due to his do-not-resuscitate status, the scientists were able to track his brain waves throughout the final moments of his life.
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