Fact of the Week: What Happens After We Die?

Today I found out that after we die the brain carries on working for more than ten minutes.

With our current understanding of death, we consider people dead the minute their hearts stop working. The respiratory and circulatory systems no longer work. This is what we consider the moment of death.

However, the brain continues to work after this. It may be the last part of the body to die. Moments before death, the brain receives a surge of electricity. There is no explanation for this. It also begins to lose oxygen.

After your breathing and heartbeat stop you are still conscious for 2-20 seconds. This is because the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for intelligence, language, memory and consciousness, can last without oxygen. Despite all this activity in the cerebral cortex, you lose all reflexive and muscular activity beofre death.

At this moment the brain is experiencing its last minutes. Brain cells start activating chemical pathways that would lead to their ultimae death. If someone manages to restart your heart through CPR or life support, your brain will receieve enough oxygen to wake up again. If there is no oxygen, your brain begins to surrender.

Most of your brain is now dead, except for the memory centre, which stores the most important of your memories. This region is not susceptible to blood loss, even through serious injuries. It is the last part of the brain to shut down. Before shutting down, the memory centre flashes moments from your life in your mind.

When doctors turned of life support for patients declared clincially dead, the brain appeared to be active for more than ten minutes. And when they performed EEG recordings on these individuals, they found striking differences between each one of them. This probably means that dying is an experience unique to the individual.

Two days after death, more than one thousand genes are still working in the body. Some of them are highly active and have very important functions: stimulating inflammation, firing up the immune system and counteracting stress. Some of these genes are only switched on during embryonic development. Is the body trying to save itself from death by reverting to a cellular stage? Some of these genes, however, promote cancer growth. Why would the body initiate cancer growth two days after death?

It's possible that what we understand about death is false. Is it correct or ethical to pronounce people dead with some parts of their body still working? Only time and more research will reveal this to us.