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Oh life! That thing where you’re born and get a little bigger, fall in love with a person (or fish), maybe produce a few smaller people, and then before you know it, it’s time for the next part: death. The inevitable disappearance of our being.
There is an eclectic range of ways you could die.
Most commonly it is from heart disease or cancer, but there are even around 600 annual victims of autoerotic asphyxiation.
No matter how it happens, at some point you will experience clinical death, which is something like life, but without breathing and blood circulation.
In other words, it is the beginning of the passage from this life to the next.
For most people, death is not completely instant.
So what can modern science tell us about the experience of those final moments?
What does feel to die?
In the last stage when death approaches, people are often very numb, so we usually imagine the experience to be a drowsy, unconscious fading away from life.
But some experiments tell a very different story.
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Maybe it’s more colorful…
In 2013, scientists at the University of Michigan measured the brain activity of dying laboratory rats.
And something very interesting happened.
After the rats went into cardiac arrest –no heartbeat or breathing-, their brains showed increased global activity, with levels of low gamma waves that were more synchronized throughout the brain than in the rats’ normal waking states.
And, incredibly, that specific type of brain activity has been linked to people’s conscious perception in previous studies.
In other words, those rats could have been experiencing something while they were between clinical death and complete brain death.
The experiment challenged the assumption that the brain is inactive during death.
Rather, it seemed that before lasting unconsciousness there might be a period of heightened awareness, and he asked: what were the rats experiencing as they died? Could the same be true for people?
Humans have larger and more complex brains than rats, but a very interesting experiment conducted at Imperial College London in 2018 shed some light on what dying might feel like in humans.
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A psychedelic ending?
Scientists wanted to investigate the similarities between two very different phenomena.
On the one hand, near-death experiences, or NDEshallucinations experienced by about 20% of people who have been resuscitated after clinical death.
On the other hand, hallucinations caused by DMT, a psychedelic drug (reliably generating a broad spectrum of subjective effects on human brain functions, including perception, affect, and cognition).
So they gave the study subjects doses of DMT, and once they returned to reality, they asked them to describe their experiences using the checklist commonly used to assess near-death experiences.
And they were surprised to see an incredible amount of common ground.
Both NDE and DMT experiences included sensations such as “transcendence of time and space” and “oneness with nearby objects and people.”
The near-death experience turned out to be strikingly similar to a powerful hallucinogen.
A psychedelic ending?
When we consider death, we think of it as a grim process of incorporation. But science asks: what if it’s psychedelic?
Neuroscientist Chris Timmermann led research on the experience of death in 2018.
We asked Dr Chris Timmermann, who led the research at Imperial College London, what could tell us this experiment on death.
“I think the main lesson of the research is that we can find death in life and in life experiences,” he said.
“What we know now is that there appears to be an increase in electrical activity.
“Those gamma waves appear to be very pronounced and may be responsible for near-death experiences.
“There are also specific regions in the brain, such as what we call the medial temporal lobes – areas that deal with memory, sleep and even learning – that could be related to those experiences as well.
“In a way, our brains are somehow simulating a form of reality.”
Around the 20% of people who have been pronunciandas clinically dead y they live report NDEs.
¿Will they all experience them and soonly a few remember them or that these experiences are very rare?
“It’s a strong possibility that there is a lack of recall due to different reasons,” Timmermann explained.
“In our experience with psychedelic DMT we have seen that when we give them high doses, there is a part of the experience that is also forgotten.
“What I think happens is that the experience is so new, that it is ineffable or difficult to put into words.
“When an experience transcends the ability to describe it with language, we have difficulty remembering it.
“But it could also be that some people just don’t experience it.”
What further research from there might help our understanding of death?
“It’s very interesting what’s going on these days with brain scans and how we can figure out what’s going on in the brain, how that goes back to experience,” he replied.
“There are scans that are done on people where you can play back, if they’re watching a movie, what kind of movie they’re watching.
“Therefore, it is possible that at some point our brain imaging techniques will become so advanced that we can read people’s minds so that we can get closer to understanding what are the brain mechanisms that underpin these very extraordinary and unusual experiences.”
Optimistic
The science of death is a pretty murky landscape, but what we already know paints a surprisingly optimistic picture.
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For example, we know that people who have had near-death experiences often report feelings of calm and serenity and show a lasting reduction in stress associated with death.
We also know that NDEs are overwhelmingly described as pain-free, meaning that heightened awareness we might experience upon death is also likely to be painless…
And maybe a little funny.
Research also shows that people tend to lose their senses in a specific order.
First hunger and thirst, then speech and vision.
Hearing and touch seem to last longerwhich means that many people can hear and feel their loved ones in their final moments, even when they appear to be unconscious.
And a recent brain scan of a dying epilepsy patient showed activity related to memory and dreams, leading to speculation that there might even be some truth to “you see life flash before his eyes.”
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Finally, we know from these experiments that the experience of death might involve heightened consciousness, possibly hallucinatory. One last psychedelic trip before nothing.
“In a society like ours, where we tend to deny death and try to sweep it under the rug, I think this is one of the great lessons that psychedelic research can teach us: chow incorporatesrla in our livesTimmerman concluded.
Ultimately, we are all going to die. But these experiments showed that the transition between life and death could be much more experiential, emotional, and even psychedelic than we might expect.
We are programmed like animals to fear our demise, but understanding death more deeply helps us relax a bit.
Those last moments may not be scary. are just part of an unavoidable journey with unknown destinationprobably painless and potentially psychedelic.
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