Oh life! That thing where you’re born and grow up a little bit, fall in love with a person (or fish), maybe produce a few more little people, and then before you even know it comes the next part: death. The inevitable extinction of our existence.

There are an eclectic array of ways to die.

It is most commonly caused by heart disease or cancer, but there are about 600 autoerotic drowning victims a year.

No matter how, at some point you will experience clinical death, which is something like life, but without breathing and blood circulation.

In other words, this is the beginning of the transition from one life to the next.

For most people, death is not entirely instantaneous.

So what can modern science tell us about the experience of these last moments?

What does it feel like to die?

In the final stage of death approaching, people often become very numb, so we often imagine the experience drowsy, unconsciously pulling away from life.

But some experiments tell a very different story.

In 2013, scientists at the University of Michigan measured the brain activity of dying lab rats.

And something very interesting happened.

After the rats had a heart attack –no heartbeat or breathing-, the brains of the mice showed increased global activity with low levels of gamma waves, which were more synchronized than the normal wakeful states of the mice.

And amazingly, this specific type of brain activity has been linked to people’s conscious perceptions in previous studies.

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In other words, these mice something they were between clinical death and complete brain death.

The experiment challenged the assumption that the brain is inactive at death.

Rather, there seemed to be a period of heightened awareness before permanent unconsciousness, and he asked: What did the mice go through when they died? Could the same be true for humans?

surprises

Humans have larger and more complex brains than mice, but a very interesting experiment done at Imperial College London in 2018 shed some light on what it might feel like to die in humans.

Scientists wanted to explore the similarities between two very different phenomena.

On the one hand, near-death experiences or NDEsHallucinations experienced by approximately 20% of persons resuscitated after clinical death.

On the other hand, hallucinations caused by DMT, a psychedelic drug (it reliably produces a wide range of subjective effects on human brain functions, including perception, affect, and cognition).

Thus, they gave the subjects doses of DMT, and when they came back to reality, they asked them to describe their experience using the checklist commonly used to evaluate near-death experiences.

And they were surprised to see an incredible amount of common ground.

Both NDE and DMT experiences included sensations such as “transcendence of time and space” and “unity with nearby objects and people.”

The near-death experience turned out to be strikingly similar to a potent hallucinogen.

A psychedelic ending?

When we think of death, we think of it as a brutal unification process. But science asks: What if this is psychedelic?

We asked Dr Chris Timmermann, who led the research at Imperial College London: What can this experiment tell us about death?.

“I think the main lesson of research is that we can find death in life and life experiences,” he said.

“What we know now is that there is an increase in electrical activity.

“These gamma waves seem very prominent and may be responsible for near-death experiences.

“There are also certain regions of the brain that may also be associated with these experiences, such as what we call the medial temporal lobes, which are responsible for memory, sleep, and even learning.

“In a way, our brain is somehow simulating a form of reality.”

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Around 20% of people who are clinically pronounced dead and alive report NDEs.

Is it that everyone experiences them and only a few remember, or that these experiences are so rare?

“There’s a strong possibility that there’s a lack of recall for different reasons,” Timmermann said.

“In our experience with psychedelic DMT, we found that when we give them high doses, there is also a part of the experience that is forgotten.

“What I think is that the experience is so new, impossible or difficult to put into words.

“When an experience goes beyond the ability to describe it in language, we have trouble remembering it.

“But it could also be that some people just don’t experience it.”

What other research from there might help us understand death?

“It’s very interesting how we can understand what’s going on with brain scans these days and what’s going on in the brain, how that goes back to experience,” he replied.

There are scans on people you can play with, if they’re watching a movie, what kind of movie are they watching.

“So it’s possible that at some point our neuroimaging techniques will be so advanced that we can read people’s minds so we can get even closer to understanding what the brain mechanisms are underlying these extraordinary and unusual experiences.”

Optimistic

The science of death is a rather dark landscape, but what we already know paints a surprisingly optimistic picture.

For example, we know that people who have had near-death experiences often feel calm and serene and show a lasting reduction in death-related stress.

We also know that NDEs are overwhelmingly described as painless, so the heightened awareness we can experience over death is likely to be painless as well…

And maybe a little funny.

Research also shows that people tend to lose their senses in a certain order.

First hunger and thirst, then speech and sight.

Hearing and touching seem to take longerThis means that many people can hear and feel loved ones in their last moments, even if they seem unconscious.

And a recent brain scan of a dying epilepsy patient showed activity related to memory and dreams, leading to speculation that there might be some truth to “you see life flashing before your eyes”.

Finally, we know from these experiments that the experience of death may involve higher consciousness, possibly hallucination. One last psychedelic ride before nothing.

“In a society like ours where we tend to deny death and sweep it under the rug, I think this is one of the greatest lessons psychedelic research can teach us: How do we include it in our lives?Timmerman is finished.

In the end, we will all die. But these experiments showed that the transition between life and death can be much more experiential, emotional, and even psychedelic than we expected.

We are programmed, like animals, to fear our death, but understanding death more deeply helps us relax a bit.

These final moments may not be scary. just a part an inevitable journey to an unknown destination, possibly painless and potentially psychedelic.