A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academyof argues that the visions that some people claimed to have when they came close to death “may not simply be a figment of their imagination.”
Researchers from the University of Michigan have discovered that shortly after a person's heart stops working, the brain becomes overloaded, even though it is no longer receiving blood.
They therefore hypothesize that this increase in brain activity is what is responsible for the so-called near-death experiences and the supposedly supernatural visions that some people have reported experiencing.
According to The Telegraph, scientists base their theory on evidence they collected while conducting a series of experiments on mice.
The researchers first anesthetized nine rodents and then caused them to go into cardiac arrest. While the mice were dying, they closely monitored their brain activity.
It was discovered that, for a period of about 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all the rodents showed a notable increase in their brain activity.
Curiously, this brain activity was not sporadic, as one might expect, but highly synchronized, as the scientists report.
This means that, during those 30 seconds, the activity in the mice's brains was not just a symptom, but was conscious.
Later, the scientists conducted another series of experiments on mice dying of asphyxiation and closely monitored their brain activity.
The results they got were no different from those they got when the animals died of cardiac arrest.
“This study tells us that reducing oxygen or both oxygen and glucose during cardiac arrest can stimulate brain activity that is characteristic of conscious processing,” says study author Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D.
"Epiphany, known electrical signals of consciousness exceeded levels and were found to be alert, suggesting that the brain is able to organize a large electrical activity during the early phase of clinical death," said expert George Mashour.
