![]() "The brain is a prediction machine," he said. The memories we may see in death are likely pre-programmed in our subconscious as a way of escorting us through the process, Zemmar said. So, I don't think that the sad is always negative." And the day he (died), I was sad, but it'll be a very memorable event in my life. “For me, my grandfather and I were very close. Now, these can include some maybe sad moments,” he said. “I'd like to think that before we die, we have a flashback of memorable moments in our life. Whether or not those important memories are positive or negative isn’t clear, Zemmar said. When a person dies, Zemmar said, “the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events … similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.” When the brain realizes 'this is it, I'm done, there is no survival' "This is what makes this case so difficult to capture and so unique that we have one," said Zemmar, who also referenced an earlier study on rats that showed rodents, at the time of their death, had brain wave patterns similar to those of healthy humans during memory recall. Either way, predicting time of death and getting an EEG ready is still a tricky business. This leaves, for potential future study participants, those who come to a hospital severely injured and near death, or those who are terminally ill. "No healthy human being is going to come and sign up for me and say, 'put the EEG on my head so I can go and die in five minutes.'" And its not standard to attach an EEG if there are no seizure concerns. It's impossible to predict the moment of death, especially in healthy people, Zemmar said. The opportunity presented by the Vancouver patient was extremely rare. Finally, he and his team decided to move forward with what they had, feeling it was important to "inform. He looked everywhere he could think of for similar data sets to include in the study, to no avail. "As a scientist, I am very, very reluctant and very cautious and hesitant to go publish something on one case." "My hesitation and the reason why it took so long (to publish) was, in science, you like to have a strong data basis to make conclusions on," he said. Zemmar's patient died in 2016, but the study was published just last month. The discovery led to a series of important questions, such as: What happens when we die? And when do humans actually die? A rare opportunity at the moment of death The results indicated a dying person may see replays of memorable life moments as they die - the proverbial "life flashing before your eyes." “This total accident has led us to the first recording of the dying human brain,” said Zemmar, who recently published a study about the brain scans, which showed brain activity consistent with memory recall through the death process.įor the study, he and his team studied 900 seconds of the patient’s neural activity, with a focus on the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped. U of L Health: University of Louisville Health plans new 9-story tower to be built by downtown hospital Zemmar and his team attached an EEG to the man’s head, a standard procedure in that situation.īut with the EEG still attached, the patient went into cardiac arrest and died. Three days after a successful operation to remove the clotting, the patient started having seizures. The 87-year-old man had taken a fall and needed treatment for a subdural hematoma - bleeding between his brain and skull. ![]() In 2016 at Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia, the now-University of Louisville neurosurgeon just wanted to save his patient’s life. Ajmal Zemmar didn’t set out to make a historical discovery and help change the way humans think about death. Watch Video: Your brain’s ‘fingerprint’ can be identified in just 100 secondsĭr. ![]()
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