The last words Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple founder, spoke were simple: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."
Their mystery is enticing – what did Jobs, the digital prophet who brought us the smartphone, see as he neared death? We’ll never know.
But stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) tantalise the living, and something unique seems to be happening inside our brains as we sense death approaching.
Despite NDE testimonies, the moments surrounding death largely remain a mystery to us, especially when it comes to the actual experience of dying.
But scientists have recently begun to explore what happens in the final moment of life by gathering data on brain activity from patients who are dying.
Using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, researchers are able to watch how patterns of brain activity change in the moments leading up to death.
The results are preliminary so far, but they show distinctive bursts of coordinated neural activity, indicating that something significant is indeed happening as our brains intuit that death may be near.
Better understanding this activity could not only demystify the dying process – offering comfort to those who have lost loved ones or are nearing death themselves – but might also help explain some of the puzzles of consciousness as well.
The brain, when it dies
Studying death isn’t easy, especially if you’re interested in the brain. People who die don’t return to tell us about the experience, and studying those in the process of dying is difficult, not to mention ethically fraught.
Some researchers have used brain scans, interviews and other medical data to study people who have experienced cardiac arrest and been ‘brought back to life’. This may not represent true death, however – at least as far as the brain is concerned.
Brain cells have a reserve of energy that allows them to keep functioning for a short time after blood flow has been cut off.
That means that a flatlining heart monitor alarm – the classic Hollywood marker of death – doesn’t actually represent brain death.
According to Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist in Louisville, Kentucky, real brain death occurs later, likely more than a minute after the heart stops. That’s when an EEG shows a halt in brain activity.
When the brain stops receiving oxygen – a state known as hypoxia – a cascade of events is set in motion.
First is a heightened burst of activity as the brain responds to the lack of oxygen, likely representing an instinctual attempt to survive. Then there’s a period of lower-frequency brain wave activity, followed by an EEG flatline.
At some point during hypoxia, brain cells begin to die. This starts with a process known as depolarisation, where nerve cells lose their electrical charge. This prompts the brain to release neurotransmitter chemicals, as well as sodium, potassium and calcium ions, among other things.
This process could be responsible for the massive surge of activity seen in EEG readings of animal brains after death.
Zemmar refers to this as the “triphasic wave of death”: an EEG representation of neurons firing uncontrollably as they depolarise, like the neural equivalent of a fireworks finale.
This ‘wave of death’ has been mostly observed through animal studies, but it may appear in humans as well.
If a human being experiences anything during this process, it’s likely to be at the beginning, during the initial rush of brain wave activity, when it appears the brain is kicking itself into a kind of overdrive.
Unlike the ‘wave of death’, this activity is highly coordinated and likely represents a conscious experience, Zemmar explains. It’s something that both those who report NDEs and those who have actually died may experience – though science can’t yet say for certain.
“Usually the brain does this when you meditate, when you perform very high [level] cognitive tasks,” he says. “It’s like the brain is… trying to pull off this very coordinated activity.”
That burst of brain activity is the focus of a small study from researchers at the University of Michigan.
They analysed data from four Michigan Medicine patients who died while being monitored by EEGs and electrocardiograms (ECGs) in the neurointensive care unit.
For these patients, all of whom were unconscious, the EEG recordings captured an unbroken record of brain activity in the minutes and seconds leading up to brain death.
Two of the four had little to no change in their brain activity before they died. But the EEG readouts for the other two patients recorded significant bursts of gamma waves beginning just seconds after their ventilators were removed.
Gamma waves are the highest frequency of brain waves and are typically associated with higher levels of conscious processing.
This coordinated brain activity happened in the temporo-parietal-occipital areas of the brain, which make up the so-called ‘posterior cortical hot zone’ – parts of the brain that are typically associated with consciousness.
The findings defy conventional scientific wisdom. The mainstream belief was that “near death, the brain basically gave up,” says Dr Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan who led the study.
By contrast, her research shows that just before death, the brain is “hyper-activated” for a brief time, especially in the gamma domain.
The findings align with those from previous animal studies Borjigin conducted, leading her to suggest that the brain activity isn’t simply random or a false signal from some other part of the body.
Borjigin’s findings align with other small studies, such as a 2009 case report series that found a spike of brain activity in seven patients shortly after they were taken off life support.
A follow-up study in 2017 found similar spikes of activity, in frequencies close to what Borjigin found, in just under 50 per cent of the patients they studied.
Not all studies looking at dying patients find these bursts of EEG activity, though, prompting researchers to ask why they only appear sometimes.
What dying patients might experience during this time is unknowable, but Borjigin suspects she may have found the neural signature of an NDE.
Her data includes evidence that areas of the brain related to memory are very active right before death, which aligns with reports of NDE survivors experiencing events from their lives, or seeing loved ones during their ‘final’ moments.
“Your family isn’t in front of you and your eyes aren’t open,” she says. “But somehow this hypoxia triggers a cascade of events that leads to memory recall.”
If ‘the wave of death’ does trigger memories, Borjigin may have found an important clue to how the brain experiences its final moments.
But it also begs another question: “Why would the brain devote so much energy just to give you memories that don’t seem to serve any immediate function?” she asks. “That’s a big question we’re still trying to address.”
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- To death and back: What near-death experiences could tell us about dying
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Understanding our final moments
There are hundreds of case reports of NDEs in the scientific literature and most report a surprisingly similar set of experiences.
NDE survivors often recount sensations of peace and unity, accompanied by a sense of floating, and visions of bright lights ahead.
Descriptions of out-of-body experiences are also common, and some patients say they perceived events happening around them while they were unconscious, though those claims have yet to be validated.
NDEs as an experience are reasonably well understood, according to Dr Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist in the Coma Science group at the University of Liège in Belgium. What’s currently missing, however, is the underlying neurological mechanism for the phenomenon.
Martial has begun putting those pieces together, publishing a 2025 review paper with colleagues that lays out a range of neurotransmitters and modes of brain activity that could combine to create an NDE.
She suspects the phenomenon begins when the brain experiences hypoxia and begins the complex ‘wave of death’ response.
A sudden drop in the ATP molecules brain cells use for energy causes increased neuronal activity, while an array of chemical messengers, or neurotransmitters, flood the brain.
During this process, spikes in serotonin, for example, could explain DNE reports of increased visual imagery. Similarly, endorphins may create a sense of peacefulness, and noradrenaline may help encode the experience into memory.
Studies of NDE-like episodes caused by, among other things, the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and incidents such as fainting, indicate that the temporoparietal junction – one of the brain regions Borjigin found was active in dying patients – might be active during NDEs, too.
Martial agrees with Borjigin that the bursts of gamma activity in dying patients could represent an NDE, but we currently lack evidence that would tie them neatly together.
That data could come soon, though, from a study Martial is conducting on cardiac arrest patients who’ve been resuscitated in hospital.
A similar study from 2023 found intriguing patterns of EEG activity in resuscitated patients, but Martial says methodology flaws prevent its data from being fully conclusive.
She says that her own study, which has been running for almost two years now, indicates distinct differences in EEG data from patients who report an NDE versus those who don’t.
Martial stresses that it’s too early to draw conclusive results from the research, however.
As to why the brain responds to a life-threatening situation with a rush of feel-good chemicals, Martial suspects that it may be an evolution of thanatosis – the ‘playing dead’ threat response seen in animals such as possums and rabbits.
“A near-death experience could be a kind of defence mechanism to face a painful, stressful, or life-threatening situation,” Martial says.
Zemmar agrees, and highlights the fact that similar neurobiological mechanisms exist in both rats and humans as an indication that this response has proven to be useful throughout our evolution.
“There must be some kind of advantage. [In evolution], things that don’t make sense usually don’t survive,” he says. “You pull yourself out of that scary place and you virtually go into some place that brings you back to safety.”
The moment you disappear
Research into NDEs and the brain’s final moments, which have long been low on the list of scientific priorities, is beginning to yield valuable insights.
Most immediately, gathering quantitative evidence that the brain is active, and likely conscious, even after the heart stops, is redefining what it means to die.
The rippling spread of neuronal depolarisation that occurs after the brain stops getting oxygenated blood means we can’t pinpoint the moment at which a conscious being disappears forever, says Zemmar.
“One of the misconceptions of human society is that there is a ‘time of death’,” Zemmar says. “Death is not a time; death is a process.”
For Martial, years of working with data from patients who are near death has deepened an appreciation for the mysteries of consciousness, raising profound existential questions while also hinting at their answers.
“I think that NDEs are essential to consider if we want to understand human consciousness because those experiences specifically happen when we don’t expect them to,” she says. “They arise in critical contexts where medical staff wouldn’t expect the patient to be conscious.”
More practically, Borjigin is intrigued by data from a 2013 study she conducted in rats that involved monitoring both their hearts and brains as they suffered a lack of oxygen.
She found many of the same features of the dying brain that cropped up in her later human study, but also something else: blocking signals from the brain to the heart.
During this process, the signals actually prolonged the time before cardiac arrest, as if the brain were actively suppressing the heart.
“That suggests the brain really has the power to shut down the entire body system,” Borjigin says. “We’re underestimating the potential role of the brain in all manners of death, especially cardiac arrest.”
Borjigin thinks this theory could be the key to helping patients on the brink of cardiac arrest survive for longer, giving doctors more time to save their lives.
Knowing that our brains are capable of producing sensations of peace, love and unity when confronted with death may also be its own reward. Imagining our own death, or the death of a loved one can be an existentially destabilising experience.
Telling patients and their families that they may find a moment of respite near death helps them, Zemmar says. “It’s not that scary black box that we think. They’re actually in peace.”
There’s a lesson here for the living, too, Zemmar notes. You may see the events of your life unfold when you die; people from your past may stand in front of you. How can you best live your life today to make sure that experience is as fulfilling as possible?
“What was the last emotional conversation you had with a friend or with your partner? Those are the things that matter,” he says.
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