In case you missed this discovery, a scientific accident found that when people die, their life may actually flash before their eyes.
Here’s what we know.
Does your life flash before your eyes when you die?
An 87-year-old patient, who had developed epilepsy, was being studied by a group of scientists. They were measuring brainwaves when he suffered a fatal heart attack during the neurological recording.
Due to the unexpected situation, the researchers were able to look back at their recordings and found that they had new information about the brain when a person is dying.
“This was actually totally by chance, we did not plan to do this experiment or record these signals,” Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a co-author of the study, told the BBC.
The study, published by the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, found that “the man’s brainwaves followed the same patterns as dreaming or recalling memories. Brain activity of this sort could suggest that a final ‘recall of life’ may occur in a person’s last moments, the team wrote.”
NBC4 Washington reported that the study was conducted in 2016, but the team of scientists waited to publish in hopes of discovering more case studies on the topic. After noting how rare their discovery was, they finally published in 2022.
“This could possibly be a last recall of memories that we’ve experienced in life, and they replay through our brain in the last seconds before we die,” Zemmar said.
Does this happen for everyone?
The New York Post reported that Dr. Sam Parnia said that there have been many reports of people who have experienced “lucid dying.”
“People have been reporting that when they were at the brink of death or when they had gone just beyond death, when they were brought back to life again, they had this incredible experience even though they appeared to be dead or in a deep coma from the perspective of the doctors,” Parnia said.
Zemmar said that he is not sure if everyone experiences this when they die or even if people strictly have positive or negative flash backs.
“If I were to jump to the philosophical realm, I would speculate that if the brain did a flashback, it would probably like to remind you of good things, rather than the bad things,” Zemmar said. “But what’s memorable would be different for every person.”