Very many of the most impressive-sounding cases of near-death experiences occur after someone has a cardiac arrest or heart attack that causes his heart to stop beating. A minute later or a few minutes later the person's heart beat may be restored after medical intervention such as CPR or the use of an IED device. There may be even a period of five or ten minutes during which the person's heart is stopped before the restoration of the heart beat. The person may then have an amazing and elaborate story to tell of what went on during this interval between his heart stopping and the restoration of his heart beating. He may recall floating out of his body and observing his body from two meters or from the top of the ceiling. He may recall traveling through some mysterious tunnel at high speeds, and briefly visiting some mystical realm where he encounters a deceased relative or some numinous mysterious Being of light.
When evaluating whether there is any possible neural explanation for the most dramatic cases of near-death experiences, a key issue is whether the brain shuts down electrically very quickly after the heart stops beating. Constant electrical activity is the hallmark of a normally functioning brain. If it were true that brains keep running fairly normally in the minutes after the heart stops beating, we might be able to explain some of these near-death experiences as being caused by something going on in the brain. The more quickly and the more fully that a brain shuts down electrically after the heart stops beating, the more difficult or impossible it is to explain near-death experiences as being caused by brain activity.
The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia [heart stopping] without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)." Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:
"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric."
Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric." meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this:
"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."
You can find quite a few additional papers asserting that brains flat-line very quickly after cardiac arrest by doing Google or Google Scholar searches for the phrase "EEG becomes isoelectric" or "EEG becomes iso-electric."
A 2013 paper co-authored by Jimo Borjigin had the misleading title "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." The paper's graphs told us a different story than the idea suggested by that title. Figure 1 of the paper is shown below. We see EEG brain wave signals from rats who were injected with a chemical causing the heart to stop.
Nothing impressive is seen. It's just what you would expect: brain signals trailing off and dying out very quickly after the heart stops. This data offers no justification for a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." An honest title of the paper would have been: "Brain waves very quickly trail off and die out after hearts stop in rats."
A 2017 paper was "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death." That 2017 paper studied the brain waves of four humans who died in Ontario, Canada after their hearts stopped. These were patients different from the four Michigan, USA patients whose deaths were documented in the 2023 Borjigin paper described below. Referring to the 2013 paper co-authored by Borjigin, the 2017 paper stated, "We also did not observe any well-defined EEG states following the early cardiac arrest period as previously reported in rats." Of course -- brain electrical activity stops when the heart stops, or only a few seconds later. The paper points out that "one must be careful about false positive EEG signals from muscular and/or cardiac sources." Motion and muscle activity shows up on EEG readouts, producing what are called motion artifacts. An involuntary muscle twitch (or a movement by a medical person of part of an unconscious body) a few seconds after death may show up as a blip on an EEG reading. Such a thing is no actual evidence of brain activity during conscious experience. A scientific paper commentary says, "Contamination of EEG recordings by muscle artifact is a well-recognized problem, especially in the high-frequency gamma range, leading to erroneous estimates of EEG spectral power and coherence (Goncharova et al., 2003; Pope et al., 2009; Fitzgibbon et al., 2013)." It is just such a false-alarm-prone gamma range that Borjigin's papers on this topic have been centered around.
Below is Figure 3 from the paper. In Patients 1, 2 and 3 there is no significant brain wave activity (as shown in the blue EEG lines) after the time point marked 0 (time of last heart beat). In Patient 4 the EEG lines flatline at five seconds after the heart stopped, and there is about 15 seconds later merely a weak blip or two around the time 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stopped, but that dies away after a few seconds.
In none of the eight patients graphed in these two papers do we have any substantive evidence of brains working for more than an instant after the patient's last heart beat.
Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of the paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a measure of heart activity.
The text below this visual tells us this about these stages that are labeled S5, S6, S7, S8, S9 and S10, using the term "bradycardia" which means lower-than-normal heart rate:
"The pacemaker was automatically turned off (S5) and restarted from S6. S7 starts when rapid heartrate drop was seen which ended when pacemaker was turned off by clinical staff. S8 denotes the bradycardia period where RR interval (RRI) is longer than 5s. In S9, RRI is below 5s (partial heartrate recovery). S10 saw the reappearance of the P-waves and further recovery of heartrate. S11 ends at the last recorded heartbeat with periodical PAC-like ECG pattern."
The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S10 (when there was "further recovery of heartrate") and no brain activity at all at stage S11, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." The data on this Patient One showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. It was a similar story for the other three patients whose data is given in this paper. By studying the graphs in the supplemental information of the paper, you can see that none of the patients showed evidence of significant brain activity occurring more than 15 or 20 seconds after their hearts stopped beating.
There is a new paper giving some additional data on this topic. The January 2025 paper is entitled "Parametrization of the dying brain: A case report from ICU bed-side EEG monitoring." We have data on a man in a coma, whose life was being maintained by machines. The machines were turned off. To get graphs of the relevant data, we have to look at the paper's Supplementary Materials, which are provided as a Word document. Supplementary Figures 3-6 show us the relevant data.
Here is one fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity. Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute.
We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says, "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)."
Here is the second fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity. Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute.
We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says, "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)."
Here is the third fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity. Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute.
We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says, "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)."
Here is the last fourth of the EEG data, matching the brain activity. Each line represents one minute of time. A number such as -02:00:00 refers to a time two minutes before the heart stopped; a number such as -00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds before the heart stopped; and a number such as 00:30:00 refers to a time thirty seconds after the heart stopped. I have red-circled the line showing the first minute after the heart stopped. We see a very clear flatlining during that minute.
We see a flatlining of brain electrical activity, except for a few scattered spikes that only last a few seconds each. These may correspond to muscle movements or twitches that can occur in the first few minutes after death. These spikes may also have been caused by staff touching the patient, and the paper is probably referring to such spikes when it says, "After death, sporadic, polymorphic artifacts are observed (likely from staff touching the patient)."
The evidence is clear: brains shut down electrically very soon after the heart stops beating, typically within 15 or 20 seconds, as indicated by these visuals and the quotes from medical or scientific authorities I gave above. So the vivid and elaborate narratives (near-death experiences) so often provided by those whose hearts had stopped cannot be explained as brain activity. The very arising of such narratives corresponding to times when brains had shut down is evidence against both the claim that the brain is the source of the mind and the claim that memory formation occurs by brain activity. Shut-down brains (electrically inactive) should never be giving rise to vivid and elaborate memories.
Scientists can be astonishingly stubborn when it comes to realizing the implications of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. I sometimes write science fiction stories on another blog of mine, and a few of those stories are about the kind of groupthink, dogmatism, and resistance to spooky observations that we see from materialists. Here are some examples: - My recent story "The Sun Seers of Planet Evercloudy" is about a constantly cloudy planet in which scientists have created a taboo under which believing in the sun is all-but-forbidden.
- My story "Planet of the Blind" is about a planet of intelligent people where no one can see, except for a small, scorned group who make claims of having a mysterious ability they call "vision," claims that the planet's mainstream scientists reject.
- My story "The Mars Mission" includes an account of a materialist Mars explorer who resolutely refuses to believe the testimony of his senses when he dies and has an out-of-body experience.
- My story "The Ocean Deniers of Centralia" is about a mainstream academia community that refuses to believe the reports of a scorned minority that describes seeing a strange realm of existence unlike any that the mainstream authorities have seen with their eyes.
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