A new study has showed that brain activity in humans continue for up to 10 minutes after a person passes. The question prevails, the brain remains active doing what?
Canadian doctors at an intensive care unit have reportedly recorded brain activity in people after they were diagnosed clinically dead, meaning their heart and organs had stopped working.
In one of the cases, a patient’s brain continued to work at the same level as that of a sleeping person for 10 long minutes after the person’s heart and lungs stopped along with his pulse.
When a person loses their pulse, it means that their hearts had stopped pumping and their organs are not working anymore because blood and oxygen is not reaching. In other words, they are dead.
However, a team of doctors from the University of Western Ontario published a study stating that they observed “single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP)”, the same kind of brain waves as observed in people in deep sleep.
All four patients had different brain activity durations, but only one of them had is as long as 10 minutes, the rest ranged between 2 and 4 minutes.
This brings back the big question humankind has asked since the first dawn, what exactly happens after death.
It has always been thought that brain activity suddenly stops along with the rest of the body’s organs, but such studies had been limited to rats.
Scientists are still ignorant to what happens a person’s mind and body after death, but there are many unproven theories. For instance, two studies published last year suggest that genes continue to function for a few days after one have passed.
The new findings have opened new questions surrounding the medical and ethical implications surrounding procedures like euthanasia and organ donation.
