The brain is still active 10 minutes after the body dies

Doctors discover that a patient's brain continues to function when the body dies clinically, providing evidence of life that continues after death.

Doctors in a special care room in Canada had a very unexpected case when turning off the life support system for 4 patients with serious diseases. A patient had continuous brain activity during 10 minutes after the heart stopped beating and produced common brain waves in deep sleep, Science Alert reported yesterday. Doctors describe this as a very special and inexplicable case.

A Canadian patient's brain is still active 10 minutes after death.(Photo: Artem Furman).

Researchers at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, assessed electrical impulses in the brain in relation to heart rate after stopping life-sustaining measures. The brain stops working before cardiac arrest occurs in 3 of the 4 patients.

However, in one case, the patient's brain continued to function after the heart stopped beating."In this patient, the single flashes still come out after the heart rate and arterial blood pressure (ABP) cease to work," the team said.

There are significant differences in brain electrical activity between the previous 30 minutes and 5 minutes after the heart stops. In the case of 4 patients, their brain activity is very different, showing that each of us experiences death in its own way. The experiment poses difficult questions about when a person dies and whether to use their body to donate organs is medically and ethically correct.

According to the researchers, detecting active brain activity for a few seconds after the heart stops beating suggests that the phenomenon is more natural than mental. In the past, there was an idea that the dying brain could not perform complex activities and thus the near-death experience (NDE) originated from the soul. The research team pointed out that the effect at the time of death could stimulate the brain to remain conscious, thereby evoking images and feelings associated with near-death experience.