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How to Tell if You're Dead

By: De_Composed in GRITZ | Recommend this post (0)
Sat, 21 Jun 25 1:15 AM | 18 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Grits Breakfast of Champeens! 		Msg. 10062 of 10075
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Because it's a VIP article, I don't know yet if it's any good. But how could it not be with a headline like that?



June 20, 2025

How to Tell if You're Dead

by Rick Moran
PJmedia.com


Contemplating death is extremely uncomfortable for most people. That includes scientists.

Jimo Borjigin, a consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, never wanted to study death. She and her team were studying the circadian rhythms that regulate our physical and mental states throughout the day.

It's a difficult subject to study, so she and her team invented a system to monitor the neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats automatically.

What she found changed her life and may be a huge breakthrough in the study of what happens to us when we die.

Borjigin tracked the rats for weeks at a time, and she began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died during the research, and when they expired, serotonin levels spiked up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating.

Serotonin spikes in humans have been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn't know what to make of the serotonin spikes in rats at the time of their deaths.

She checked the literature on death to see if she could unravel the mystery.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

Today, Borjigin studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on her findings.
Is it possible for the human brain to be activated by the dying process? We addressed this issue by analyzing the electroencephalograms (EEG) of four dying patients before and after the clinical withdrawal of their ventilatory support and found that the resultant global hypoxia markedly stimulated gamma activities in two of the patients. The surge of gamma connectivity was both local, within the temporo–parieto–occipital (TPO) junctions, and global between the TPO zones and the contralateral prefrontal areas. While the mechanisms and physiological significance of these findings remain to be fully explored, these data demonstrate that the dying brain can still be active. They also suggest the need to reevaluate role of the brain during cardiac arrest.
These findings are more than just a matter of scientific curiosity. They challenge our definitions of when death occurs and leave open the yawning possibility that while our body may have stopped functioning, our consciousness may survive for hours or days after death.

Nautilus:
While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.
The legal, religious, and medical definitions of "death" are often at odds. “The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Medical advances in the last 100 years have clouded the issue of when death occurs. The emergence of technologies, including ventilators and defibrillators, has made the definition of death even more fraught. That's when the "irreversibility" standard was employed to define death.

In 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) was passed.
The UDDA sought to bridge the cardiopulmonary and brain-based concepts, defining death as either the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. This latter point acknowledges that it’s the brainstem that controls essential, automatic functions such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, and its inclusion places the UDDA more in line with a “whole-brain” approach rather than a “higher brain” model focusing on consciousness as a hallmark of life. Today, medical professionals use UDDA criteria when declaring someone dead, kickstarting the legal, social, and clinical processes that come next, including organ donation, mourning rituals, and the settling of a person’s personal affairs.
Sam Parnia, a clinician at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, says, “We see now that death is a continuum, and cadavers are often in a state of reversibility for hours, if not days postmortem.”

Nothing about consciousness? Are we still "self-aware" and cognizant of our surroundings after we "die"?

“We still have no idea how it is that something like a brain cell can create something like a thought," says Parnia.

The mystery of consciousness and how the conscious mind works at the point of "death" remains hidden from our scientific instruments. Or perhaps, it was never there to find. As the human mind stretches to understand everything about our existence, we may always encounter a brick wall at the point where the physical and spiritual worlds intersect.



http://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2025/06/20/how-to-tell-if-youre-dead-n4941005


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