Your doctor or your relatives may not tell you but you can make it from their behavior and eyes that you have very little time left. You are on the hospital bed waiting to embark on the biggest mysterious journey of your life- into the death. The time starts to slow down and your awareness of the surrounding increases. Your eyes start to get heavy and start to close. It may be you are aware that you are just about to die or maybe it feels like you are going to sleep and slip quietly. What is your brain doing when your body is taking its last breadths?
The brain is 3.3 pounds of tissue compared to your whole body weight but it is the command center for your body from where the whole battle of life is fought. The boss is sitting there directing the battle. The brain is composed of the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe in addition to the countless number of neurons and its connections. The brain controls everything- the functions of respiratory, motor, circulatory, spine, and many other smaller functions connected to the nerve. There can be two situations of your death first, when your brain kills the body and second, when your body kills the brain.
Brain kills the body- This happens when you suffer an injury on the brain which can be due to a bullet injury on the head or a severe blunt injury or stroke and the brain is not able to sustain the body. In such cases the brain shuts down instantaneously and the body may not realize immediately that the brain has stopped. In some cases the lower brain functions may continue which we call as brain dead. The brain is technically speaking alive but body functions have stopped and the person is on life support to keep the heart pumping.
Body kills the brain- The body function provides the critical oxygen to the brain to keep it functioning at an optimal level. If the circulatory system cannot provide the required oxygen to the brain then the brain will start suffocating and will eventually die due to lack of oxygen. This can happen when there is a serious injury to one of the critical organs, excessive blood outflow, heart attack, cancer or natural old age when the major organs start to fail. In these cases there are chances of medical intervention to save you but even doctors can do to a certain limit only.
In such cases the brain will be shutting down slowly and people can experience the sensation of dying. But what is that person experiencing during the moment of death? Various people who have shared their experience about near death experience or returning from being declared brain dead. They have spoken about it and written books on it. But doctors believe that such experience could be due to hypoxia and the severe trauma leading to hallucination. The experiences ranges from, seeing own life in a fast forward mode (my personal experience) or seeing dead relatives ready to take your soul to heaven or seeing a tunnel of white light. A deeply religious person may also claim to see angels and god.
Scientists have studied what the brain is doing in the last moments through EEG scans, though they cannot say what the dying person is feeling in those last moments. They found that the brain activity increases during the moment of death. Also when experimenting with mouse it has been found that the brain may not die when the body dies. Though in most cases it can be a few seconds but Canadian doctors in 2018 found some disturbing facts when working on terminally ill patients. Life support was removed from 4 terminally ill patients but one patient’s brain activity was recorded for up to 10 minutes while there was no pulse and unresponsive pupil. It may be that during a non traumatic death the body lets the brain go into deep sleep and then die.
Another theory is called the dark wave. When there has a traumatic injury then brain starts to shut down one by one taking the brain to a depression, confusion and disorientation. But when the brain dies due to body then there is a relatively optimistic theory. It has been noticed that people dying in hospital palliative care have a peaceful expression in the face in the last moments. Experiments on rats have shown that the serotonin levels increase by three times during the last minutes. Serotonin affects the feeling of happiness. A serotonin release during the last moments is likely to take away the fear of death and pain and enjoy a natural high.
There is only one way to find out what actually happens in the last moments, but that is a one way street.
(This article is dedicated to Telesfor sir who lost his father very recently)
Thank you Telesfor sir.