Brain Activity 10 Minutes After Death?
March 8th, 2017Via: ScienceAlert:
Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit have stumbled on a very strange case – when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead.
For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep.
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“In 2013, researchers reported finding DMT in the pineal gland of rodents — the pineal gland in the brain produces melatonin (a hormone derived from serotonin) which affects sleep patterns and circadian rhythms. This study sparked the widespread assertion that DMT occurs in the human pineal gland and is released during dreams as well as at or shortly before birth and death, but the claim still needs to be scientifically verified with further research.
Dr. Rick Strassman, a Stanford University graduate with a specialization in psychiatry and psychopharmacology, is the torchbearer behind the idea that DMT is released when we are born and when we die. He took on a five year project to investigate the effects of DMT, and administered about 400 doses of the drug to nearly five dozen heavily pre-screened volunteers. Throughout his work, him and his team coined a new rating scale called the Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS), which has been widely accepted throughout the international research community — over 45 articles have documented its use as a solid instrument for measuring psychological effects.
Interestingly, based on his extensive research and observations, Dr. Strassman hypothesizes that when a person is approaching death or possibly even just in a dream state, the body releases relatively large amounts of DMT. The majority of his volunteers reported profound encounters with non-humans and deep spiritual experiences, and Dr. Strassman believes that DMT could explain some of the wild imagery described by survivors of near-death experiences as well as those recounting their dreams.”
http://thescienceexplorer.com/brain-and-body/psychedelic-drug-may-be-released-our-brains-we-die
Interesting to see if, should the termination of life support and pursuant heart cessation be reversible, the presence of brain waves after ‘death’ has any correlation to the likelihood of a patient to regain consciousness (as some coma patients on life support do despite prognoses to the contrary).