New Study on the dying brain

Does anyone wanna take the challenge of breaking all this down? Someone much smarter than me .. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...egins.html

Does anyone wanna take the challenge of breaking all this down? Someone much smarter than me .. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...egins.html

I’m not smarter than you but this study is yet another study demonstrating brain waves detectable by EEG minutes into death. 

It’s only a few years ago there was a firm believe that the brain was completely ‘flatlined’ 15 seconds into death.

Then, 6.5 seconds later, EEG activity starts to change due to the shortage of oxygen. After 15 seconds there is a straight, flat line and the electrical activity in the cerebral cortex has disappeared completely.

https://pimvanlommel.nl/en/pim-van-lommel/life-goes-on/

There’s no evidence either for or against this brain activity being correlated with NDEs at this time.

If I may, I'll venture some opinions.

Personally, in this case I'm pretty much uninterested in the conscious experiences such as NDEs or OBEs or experiences of other realms or beings, which might be guessed as maybe or maybe not having anything to do with what happens in the brain, since this study offers no data on that topic. There is some speculation:

'We know that these brainwaves in healthy subjects are responsible for memory recall,' Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville who was not involved in the research, told DailyMail.com.

'So we are wondering if at the time of death, perhaps the same thing happens: that you have a memory recall after your heart stops beating and the brain prepares to undergo death.'

Yet the patient is clearly unconscious when this happens, Mahon said.

Some believe that this activity is responsible for the near-death experiences people report, she added.

'An alternative hypothesis (ours) is that near-death experiences occur during the gradual return of cortical activities (which resemble those associated with hallucinations) after successful resuscitation.'

... as well as an assertion of belief:

Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for scientists to know exactly how each part of the dying experience feels.

'Once someone dies, you can not ask them,' Zemmar said.

That last statement is not particularly a truth, rather it is a declaration of a belief or set of beliefs around the permanence of death.

Which is rather odd when the rest of the study is about its non-permanence. For example,

'It is now established that, from a physiological point of view, death is a process that takes its time,' said lead researcher Stéphane Charpier, 'and that it is currently impossible to dissociate it rigorously from life.'

That's restating something which was known and discussed in the 1970s, see  Lyall Watson - The Romeo Error, where it is argued that life is indistinguishable from death, the two states merge into one another with no clear boundary.

Another selected quote,

In most cases in people, restoring breathing within four minutes of the heart stopping will prevent brain death.

That's not particularly interesting (except perhaps for its timidity), as it represents a very tiny elapsed time compared with some of the known cases where people have been resuscitated after many hours with no breathing or heartbeat - usually under cold conditions such as in snow or falling in very cold water.

I looked at the referenced scientific paper but that was mostly beyond my area of knowledge.

Does anyone wanna take the challenge of breaking all this down? Someone much smarter than me .. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...egins.html

The title and lead-in synopsis of the article:

"Scientists tell DailyMail.com they are one step closer to reversing process of dying after discovering EXACTLY where the brain's 'wave of death' begins

Brain death is not as simple as throwing a switch from the 'on' to 'off' position - it involves multiple processes that team up to culminate in the brain shutting off.
The process of dying can be reversed, but only up until a still-unknown point. READ MORE: Scientists recorded a man's brain activity at the moment he died"

Comment:

The primary importance of this work as considered here is the use of such studies by materialist skeptics as supposed evidence against the reality of NDEs as glimpses of spiritual existence beyond death. Instead, NDEs are supposed to be the hallucinatory paroxysms of a dying brain.
In these theories, consciousness literally is the brain and its neurological activity. 

First, the above implicit materialistic assumption is directly invalidated by the Hard Problem of mind and consciousness. 

Also, I can only repeat my remarks in another thread: "Learning some of the details of how the brain shuts down during the process of death is basically irrelevant to understanding the mystery of NDEs.
There is still the mystery (from the materialistic standpoint) of the inexplicably transcendent and spiritual nature of many of the experiences given in the accounts. A few examples: why is the predominant experience: various versions of The Light, inexpressible Love, a life review, travel to a higher spiritual realm by means of some sort of tunnel or other transportation means, communication with spiritual beings, etc. This specific coordinated self-consistent elaborate picture rather than the random distortions and hallucinations to be expected of some sort of abnormal neurological activity caused by progressive organizational breakdown of the brain in the process leading to death.

And this above area of (indirect) evidence is independent of the fact that there is a lot of direct empirical evidence in the form of many verified veridical NDEs."

Does anyone wanna take the challenge of breaking all this down? Someone much smarter than me .. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...egins.html

I skimmed the paper... their results provide more detail into where and when the brain cells depolarised due to lack of energy, and repolarised when energy was restored. They mentioned that they had found similar neural correlates of consciousness as Borjigin et. al. 2013 prior to depolarisation.

I skimmed the paper... their results provide more detail into where and when the brain cells depolarised due to lack of energy, and repolarised when energy was restored. They mentioned that they had found similar neural correlates of consciousness as Borjigin et. al. 2013 prior to depolarisation.

I was under the impression that the search for neural correlates of consciousness has so far been unsuccessful.

I was under the impression that the search for neural correlates of consciousness has so far been unsuccessful.

I think this would depend on how specific you mean. We know that you need certain parts of the brain to mediate memory for example.

I think this would depend on how specific you mean. We know that you need certain parts of the brain to mediate memory for example.

I implicit understood it as the “minimal neural correlate of consciousness”. My mistake.

I was under the impression that the search for neural correlates of consciousness has so far been unsuccessful.

I guess this statement surprises me and doesn't seem to make sense, at least for the common meanings of these words. For very many years it has been obvious that there are countless neural correlates to consciousness, starting with the numerous obvious everyday repeatable effects on consciousness of common ingested substances such as alcohol and various drugs, where the areas of the brain affected by these substances and many of the detailed neurophysiological changes and types of damage caused by these chemicals have become known. Another obvious area is the effects of brain injuries on consciousness, which similarly have been localized to damage to various particular areas of the brain structure, with repeatedly correlating effects on consciousness. Then there is the burgeoning field of brain scans in real time, individually identifying small areas of the brain as having enhanced or inhibited activity correlated to different states of consciousness and even to specific types of thoughts. All this research has collectively identified a host of specific brain structures as being associated with a host of particular specific psychological functions and parameters. This is just the tip of an iceberg. 

The key point from all this is that in basic principle, correlation is not causation, and such research and universal ubiquitous common experience logically does not at all imply that for certain the brain actually generates consciousness. That last materialistic conclusion may seem like common sense to the materialist, but it really is logically and philosophically invalid. The filter/transmitter dualistic theory fits these common observations just as well, or even better when certain paranormal phenomena are considered, such as veridical NDE OOBEs and the fact that many NDEers experience enhanced states of consciousness while their brains are dysfunctional due to trauma.