Many people have been perilously close to death in their lives, but thankfully if you’re reading this now you don’t know what it really feels like to actually die. However, if you’re keen to get a better idea in advance of your inevitable demise, some helpful scientists have been busy studying what happens to the body at the point of death and have put together a handy video guide just in time for Halloween.
They cram a shed-load of biology into the video (below), which uses the example of death-by-slasher to explain the sequence of events, but in short – this is what happens:
Intense Fear
Intense Pain
The Body Dies
Increased Brain Activity
The Brain Dies
OK, so there are other ways to die which may not be so traumatic, but what’s most interesting here is that once you are clinically dead, i.e. you stop breathing and your heart stops beating, your brain carries on for a bit and goes into what they describe as a “hyper-state of perceptual, neural activity”.
It’s not clear why this happens or if there’s some evolutionary purpose, but it has been used to explain near-death experiences, such as seeing bright light, out-of-body experiences and other hallucinations… or are they hallucinations? Could there be life after death? Well, there’s more than one way to find out.
