Death, a universal human experience, remains shrouded in mystery for the most part. Recent breakthroughs in medical research are shedding some light on what happens when we die, challenging our understanding of the hereafter. Near-death experiences offer a fascinating glimpse into the unknown.
Imagine experiencing your life’s memories in rapid succession, as if watching a film on fast-forward, reliving every moment of your life in the blink of an eye.
Across cultures and centuries, the notion of an afterlife has been a cornerstone of human spirituality, philosophy, and cultural heritage, shaping our perspectives and behaviour.
Many religions offer differing perspectives on the hereafter. For instance, while Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism believe in an afterlife where souls are judged, and either rewarded or punished, Hinduism and Buddhism teach that the soul undergoes reincarnation or rebirth, where the soul transitions into a new existence based on accumulated karma.
For the Buddhists and Hindus, if a person has good karma (consequences a person’s action) in a previous life, then their Ātman or individual soul will be reborn into something better than they were previously. Souls can reincarnate into different forms, including animals, depending on their accumulated karma.
This is seen as a temporary state, and the ultimate goal is to attain human form again, focusing on achieving enlightenment, transcending the cycle of rebirth and attaining Nirvana (release or deliverance from suffering).
In 2016, when an 87-year-old developed epilepsy, Dr Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu, Estonia and colleagues used continuous brain wave tests (Electroencephalography, EEG) to detect seizures and treat the patient. Unfortunately, during these recordings, the patient had a heart attack and passed on.
Dr Vicente and his team, for the first time ever, were able to record activity of a dying human brain. The Scientists noticed something interesting after the life-support machines were turned off. There was a big increase in brain activity for 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and this activity was happening in areas of the brain that are linked to dreams and out-of-body experiences.
A study by Dr Ajmal Zemmar of the University of Louisville, published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death, and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.
Near-death experiences are extremely vivid and often change people’s lives. They usually happen when someone’s body is under extreme stress, like during trauma or cardiac arrest.
A few reported features of near-death experience include; bright light at the end of a long tunnel, a sense of peace and comforting calm, the mind functioning faster and more clearly, a sensation of leaving the body, meeting of loved-ones long deceased and, a peek into the future.
With the emergence of new technologies, doctors might now have the means and tools to better understand what happens in the brain on the threshold of death. However, for some time now, there have been different schools of thought on the subject, with different opinions from the religious, some of them evangelical Christians, to Parapsychologists.
As researchers, the evangelicals aim had been to collect as many reports on near-death encounters as possible to prove to the world the existence of life after death. They believed that these experiences are journeys into the divine.
The other near-death researchers were parapsychologists. These have been more interested in studying things that seemed to go against what science normally says, and were mostly scientists who followed standard scientific methods of questioning.
They believe that near-death experiences showed that our consciousness, or awareness, might keep going even after we die. Many of them, physicians and psychiatrists who had been deeply affected after hearing the near-death stories of patients they had treated in the ICU.
Gradually, the evangelicals moved from research to Christian talk radio, and the Parapsychologists moved to bring their near-death studies to the scientific mainstream.
With the advent of AI, the results of this research is bound to come to fruition much earlier than was earlier anticipated.
