Do we see a white light or do we perceive the feeling of the end?
A group of scientists began a study on what happens before people die. The experiment proposes the monitoring of the neurological activity of the brains of the patients chosen for this experiment, which should not be resuscitated using a variety of electrode strips or matrices as the events progressed. First, in eight out of nine of them, the team detected the flash of brain cells trying to stop the inevitable.
The neurons work filling with charged ions, creating electrical imbalances between them and their environment which allows them to generate the small shocks that constitute their signals. And maintaining that imbalance, the authors wrote, is a constant effort.To feed it, those cells drink from the bloodstream, swallowing oxygen and chemical energy.
When the body dies and the flow of blood to the brain stops, oxygen-deprived neurons try to accumulate the resources that they have left, the researchers explain.Sending signals from one place to another is a waste of those precious last sips of life. Therefore, the neurons are silent, and instead use their remaining energy reserves to maintain their internal burdens, waiting for the return of a blood flow that will never come.
Nobody knows what happens at the time of death. Many scientists have offered some answers on the subject, however, this is still one of the great mysteries of the world. Trying to solve it is a path plagued by practical and ethical difficulties.
A team of scientists from the University of Charité in Berlin, in Germany, and the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, under the direction of Jens Dreier, have found a way to do a pioneering study that will provide fascinating information on the neurobiology of death.
"Depolarization of the terminal diffusion and electrical silence in the death of the human cerebral cortex", this was the title of the research and in order to carry it out, they obtained the consent of the relatives of several patients with existing conditions that required invasive neural monitoring.
The patients of the clinical trial had suffered terrible traffic accidents, strokes, and cardiac arrests, so there was an order not to resuscitate them. By working with people with these characteristics, scientists discovered that the brains of animals and humans perish in a similar way, but also that there is a remarkable period in which the restoration of brain functioning is, hypothetically, possible.
The ultimate purpose of the study was not to superficially observe the final moments of a person's life but to perceive how others could be saved from death at the last moment in the future. In the case of animals, much of what was known about brain death before the work of these scientists was the product of experiments with animals made in the twentieth century.
The procedure used is that the brain is deprived of oxygen, the cardiovascular system of the body stops, that is where a condition known as cerebral ischemia takes place, in which the lack of necessary chemical components leads to a "complete electrical inactivity" in the brain.
It is considered that this so-called brain silencing occurs so that the hungry neurons conserve their energy, but it is in vain because death is about to come. All the important ions escape from the brain cells, as the supplies of adenosine triphosphate, the compound that stores and transports energy throughout the body, are depleted. Then, tissue recovery becomes impossible.