Canadian doctors have revealed that, by monitoring patients in intensive care, that brain activity could carry on long after the individual has drawn their last breath and the heart has stopped beating.
The groundbreaking research showed that although the person was dead, the brain carried on working and exhibited the same brain waves – known as delta wave bursts – one undergoes during a deep sleep.
The team from the University of Western Ontario in Canada said: "In one patient, single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP).”
However, to add more mystery to the already curious case of death, only one person – of the four monitored – showed the brain waves, leading scientists to believe that the process of death could be unique to each individual.
The report adds: “There was a significant difference in EEG [electroencephalographic] amplitude between the 30-minute period before and the 5-minute period following ABP cessation for the group.”
Previous studies had led scientists to believe that brain activity usually ceases after around a minute after death in one final surge.
The report says though that “We did not observe a delta wave within 1 minute following cardiac arrest in any of our four patients.”
But the findings open up the door to a realm of possibilities over what could cause the newly discovered phenomena, even though the team behind the research say that the case study they provided is too small to provide definitive answers.
One possibility could be that it is simply a natural malfunction in our bodies which is not meant to happen.
The report reads: "It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG activity given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation.
"These waveform bursts could, therefore, be artefactual [human error] in nature, although an artefactual source could not be identified."
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