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Have a good life flash before your eyes how to#
This research is part of a wider project to try to understand the mystery of consciousness, and how to detect it using brain monitors. 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, in turn, allowed the activation of dormant visions and long-lost memories, at least for a little time. 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'. There was no such change in the brains of the other two patients who had died.Įven more surprisingly, this burst of gamma-wave activity occurred in parts of the brain that are linked with dreaming and having visual hallucinations. This surge lasted for several minutes and, at times, was intense - 'crazy high', according to one of the researchers. This was a surprise because gamma waves are a form of fast brain activity and are normally associated with being conscious and alert.
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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. 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. 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. 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 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. So I was moved to see the results of a recent project where researchers had managed to do something similar. The documentary was never made because our volunteer, having initially been enthusiastic, decided at the last moment she didn't want to be filmed. 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
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