Dr. Jimo Borjigin found a 24-year-old dying pregnant woman’s brain revealed a breakthrough discovery in consciousness. After she was taken off oxygen, her brain became very active. Parts of her brain that had been quiet while she was on life support suddenly started to buzz with strong electrical signals known as ‘Gamma waves’.
For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die.
Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support in 2014. She became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history. At the time Borjigin began her research into Patient One, the scientific understanding of death had reached an impasse.
When Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.
“I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” said Borjigin.
Patient One
Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support in 2014. A few years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a condition that caused an irregular heartbeat.
During her previous two pregnancies, she had experienced seizures and fainting. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed at home. Her mother, who was there, called 911. When the ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for over 10 minutes, and her heart had stopped.
After being taken to a hospital where they couldn’t help her, Patient One was brought to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, doctors had to shock her heart three times with a defibrillator to get it beating again. She was put on a ventilator and pacemaker, then moved to the neurointensive care unit to check her brain activity. She didn’t respond to anything around her and had serious swelling in her brain. After being in a deep coma for three days, her family decided to turn off her life support. It was then, after her oxygen was stopped and the breathing tube was removed, that…
Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One. (Source)
After Patient One was taken off oxygen, her brain became very active. Areas that were quiet while she was on life support suddenly started to show strong electrical activity called gamma waves. The parts of the brain related to consciousness became especially active. In one area, the signals lasted for more than six minutes. In another, the signals were 11 to 12 times stronger than before her ventilator was removed.
“As she was dying, her brain was working in overdrive,” Borjigin explained. For about two minutes after the oxygen was stopped, her brain waves synchronized intensely, a state linked to attention and memory. The synchronization slowed down for about 18 seconds, then picked up again for over four minutes. It decreased for a minute, then increased a third time.
During the time when Patient One was dying, different parts of her brain suddenly started communicating with each other. The strongest connections happened right after her oxygen was cut off, lasting almost four minutes. Another strong burst of communication happened more than five minutes after she was taken off life support.
The parts of her brain responsible for conscious experience – the ones that work when we’re awake or dreaming – were talking to areas involved in memory. Parts of the brain linked to empathy were also active. Even as she moved further into death, it seemed like something almost like life was still happening in her brain for several minutes.
Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.
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Based on the activity and connections in certain parts of her dying brain, Borjigin thinks it’s likely that Patient One had a strong near-death experience. This would include feelings of being outside her body, seeing lights, feeling peace or happiness, and reassessing her life.
However, since Patient One didn’t recover, no one can prove that these brain activities actually correspond to real experiences. Bruce Greyson and Pim van Lommel, a Dutch heart doctor, argue that Patient One’s brain activity can’t explain near-death experiences because her heart didn’t fully stop. But this argument doesn’t hold up, since there’s no solid proof that near-death experiences only happen when the heart has completely stopped.
At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death. “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.
Borjigin believes that understanding the dying brain is one of the “holy grails” of neuroscience. “The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?” Although most people would take that result for granted, Borjigin thinks that, on a physical level, it actually makes little sense. (Source)
This isn’t the first time they have evidence of brain activity during death, especially in the area that is associated with memory.
Scientists accidentally captured unique brain data from an elderly man who died suddenly during a routine test. Just before and after his heart stopped, his brain waves were similar to those seen during dreaming, remembering, and meditating. This suggests that people may really experience their life “flashing before their eyes” when they die. (Source)
Some people who have had near-death experiences have reported seeing their memories replayed. However, this is the first scientific evidence that this “flash” might actually happen. Since this is just one case, it’s hard to know how common it is or exactly what the experience feels like.
The discovery was made in 2016 when scientists were studying the brain activity of an 87-year-old man with epilepsy. While performing a brain test (EEG) to understand his seizures, the man suffered a heart attack and died. This unexpected death led to the first-ever recording of a dying brain.
I think it more likely to be the brain realising its lost its oxygen source and its going thru lots of previous memories to see if it can find a way to find more oxygen. Possibly her life flashing before her eyes
I find it hard to believe that patient 1 was prepared for extensive eeg studies via PET, MRI, MRA etc when she was not admitted for brain studies in a laboratory setting one would require for such studies.
She was admitted for death.
So tell us more.
I fully agree, Jaque. From what I’ve read, it appears that the initial hospital referred them to the research hospital without proper care, fully aware they would be used for experiments. Many State University Hospitals seem to have corrupt and unethical practices.