Are you one of those who believe that in the final moments of life — seconds before the final departure — there is a flash flood of memories of one’s whole life?

That memories whipsaw the brain during the liminal space between life and death has been nothing more than an indistinct nebula of belief because no dead man has been obliging enough to give an account of his sentience, but serendipitously obtained data is providing some backing to the belief.

If an elderly patient with epilepsy had not given his doctors a ‘do-not-resuscitate' instruction, the story may have ended differently. However, as it happened, even as the doctors were doing an electro encephalogram (EEG) test to check the electrical activity in his brain after he had a seizure, the 87-year-old Canadian had a sudden heart attack and died.

A recent research paper published in the journal Frontiers of Aging Neuroscience has detailed, scientific information about the delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma wave activity in the individual. (These refer to the bands of frequencies in the electrical waves generated by the brain — delta being the lowest frequency and gamma the highest.) Later, when the doctors crunched through these charts, they found the patterns indicating memory upsurge.

“Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive process and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last “recall of life” that may take place in the near-death state,” the paper says. (The paper has been authored by 13 researchers from universities across the world.)

There are EEG recordings of people who have gone through a near-death experience, but they always came back to tell the story; this EEG is the first of a dying man.

The researchers also observed brain activity even after blood flow to the brain ended, raising questions on when exactly life ends.

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