A Finnish-based researcher has suggested that consciousness may continue even after the brain stops working, based on accounts from people who had cardiac arrests and recalled vivid experiences during times when they showed little or no electrical brain activity.
Pekka Rechardt argued that some near-death experiences can occur while an electroencephalogram (EEG) showed a flat recording, according to Daily Mail reports. He suggests that consciousness may therefore not depend on brain activity, because the near-death experiences presented three clear signs of awareness: a sense of being present, vivid sensations, and the ability to experience events coherently.
Consciousness as more than brain processes
Rechardt puts forward the analogy of someone walking along a sunny beach and experiencing everything that comes with it, saying that different parts of the brain process all the information separately but the person feels them all at once, showing consciousness is more than the individual brain processes involved.
He went on to argue that describing physical events in space and time does not explain the personal sense of presence, likening it to detecting a brain response to a colour, and explaining what the colour feels like when the person sees it. He pointed out that while death might end the connection between the brain and consciousness, that might not mean awareness ends completely, in much the same way, as he explained, as destroying a painting wouldn't destroy the person looking at it.
Near-death experiences as a glimpse
Rechardt suggests that near-death experiences could offer 'a glimpse' of what awaits us after death has occurred and bodily functions keeping us alive have ended. However, the continued existence of awareness would depend on any framework which doesn't rely on the brain to exist.
While the mysteries of death are set to remain just that, others working in end-of-life care have revealed what some of their patients experience right before they die. End-of-life expert Catherine Duncan said on TikTok that people might see relatives who have died before them, or some even say they are 'going on a trip', that loved ones are waiting for them or that they can hear music.
Others report that they've been speaking to a relative who has told them 'it's time' to go. 'Sometimes the permission they need doesn't come from us. It comes from someone on the other side,' Duncan explained.
