Your Brain May Stay Aware After You Technically Die

When it comes to questions that have been asked since the beginning of time, there’s no argument that “what happens after we die” is one of the oldest and most often pondered. It affects 100% of humans, after all, and we all have a natural fear of the “end” of our lives, and our bodies, and our awareness of the only world we’ve ever known.

Now, it seems that science is hopping on the bandwagon and (maybe, possibly) on the verge of getting us some real answers.

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That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news is that recent research seems to indicate that brains remain active after death – which could mean we’re aware that we’ve passed away.

In order to prove this theory, a team from New York University’s Langone School of Medicine has been studying cardiac patients whose hearts have stopped for brief period’s of time. What they found has been nothing short of eerie.

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According to researcher Dr. Sam Parnia:

“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.”

Dr. Parnia confirmed that the accounts the patients gave were verified with nurses, technicians, and others in the room – people who were not technically dead at the time of the goings-on.

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Using this information and additional machine readings, Parnia and the rest of the NYU team have found that there is a sudden burst of brain activity at the exact moment of death – brain waves that are normally associated with consciousness, which lends credence to the theory that the person on the table may have known they died before their actually brain followed suit.

Which is, I don’t know…disconcerting?

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The study isn’t over, though. Researchers are hoping to understand the purpose of that burst of activity in order to better grasp the “universal experience we’re all going to have when we die.”

I guess there is always fear in the unknown, so investigating that could help people be more accepting of that inevitable end of the road we’re all going to hit.