Scientists Explain What Actually Happens When You Die

Scientists have extensively studied the biological processes that occur when a person dies. While death is a complex and multifaceted event, it can generally be described in biological terms. Here's what scientists understand about what happens when you die:

Cessation of Brain Activity: When the heart stops beating, blood circulation ceases, and the brain is deprived of oxygen and nutrients. Within a few seconds, brain activity, including consciousness and awareness, ceases.

Loss of Brain Function: Without oxygen and nutrients, brain cells start to die rapidly. This irreversible damage to the brain is a significant factor in defining death.

Shutdown of Organs: As the body's systems lose their blood supply and oxygen, they begin to shut down. The lungs stop functioning, leading to respiratory failure, and the heart stops beating, leading to cardiac arrest.

Release of Brain Chemicals: During the process of dying, the brain releases various chemicals and neurotransmitters, which may lead to various experiences reported by people who have had near-death experiences, such as hallucinations, visions, and feelings of peace.

Decomposition: After death, the body undergoes a process of decomposition. Bacteria and enzymes in the body begin to break down tissues, leading to the eventual disintegration of the body.

Cellular Death: The lack of oxygen and nutrients causes all cells in the body to die. This is a gradual process and may take some time to complete fully.

Rigour Mortis: Rigour mortis is the stiffening of the body's muscles after death. It occurs as a result of chemical changes in the muscles and usually begins a few hours after death.

Post-Mortem Changes: After death, the body undergoes various changes due to the lack of circulation and oxygen. These changes, such as livor mortis (pooling of blood), algor mortis (cooling of the body), and autolysis (breakdown of cells), help forensic experts determine the approximate time of death.

It is important to note that discussions about what happens after death can also include philosophical, religious, and spiritual perspectives, which may vary widely among different cultures and belief systems. The scientific understanding of death focuses on the biological and physiological processes involved, but beliefs about consciousness, the soul, and the afterlife remain topics of philosophical and religious debate.

it's heartbreaking and indeed very frightening when you see news flashes of death tolls all around the world globally about 60 million people die annually which brings us to about 213 deaths every minute in 2023 these huge scary figures could have you thinking about when it'd be your turn whether the next minute or not one sure thing is that death is inevitable but what happens before during and after death is there actually an afterlife Journey with me as I walk you through what actually happens when you die while you spend away your day in your favorite game room eating pizza and gaming with your friends some people are busy hanging out on beaches While others spend their day making money and planning how to grow their businesses but do you know that some other people have devoted themselves to courses that would take them their entire life to study these exceptional individuals are driven by great curiosity and passion to bring answers to several questions that seem unexplained to humans one of such people is Samaria MD PhD associate professor of medicine and director of critical care at resuscitation research at NYU Langone I bet you don't know what happens to you when you die well you'll know now thanks to samparnia conducted new research with the goal of developing measurements and methods to better capture end-of-life phenomena like cognitive Lucidity and identifying Innovative strategies to improve the quality of resuscitation following Cardiac Arrest because of the bra broadness of this study Sam parnia worked hand in hand with several professionals including specialists in geriatrics dementia neurology Psychiatry Rehabilitation medicine population health and several professionals from other organizations this lengthy and productive research was named the awareness study if you want to find out what the awareness study was all about and the end result of the study you gotta watch till the end meanwhile a total of 330 patients were successfully revived in the participating facilities during the awareness studies standardization of care for the relevant patients however 140 interviews were eventually conducted owing to the sad fact that some of the participants regrettably passed away shortly after or were unable to participate in the study due to their health more than 50 patients admitted that they had memories of being unconscious during the interviews and nine of these incidents fit the description of near-death experiences during their resuscitation two participants also claimed to have had out of body and audio-visual perceptions furthermore one of the survivors described her experience as being on the treatment room ceiling and helplessly staring down at her own body while the event unfolded just as this participant could actually watch the doctors and their aides at work another later described how he saw as his blood pressure was taken and how a nurse gave him a chest compression another test subject also recounted a similar experience in which he was just above the scene and saw the medical professionals performing resuscitation while the patient a 57-year-old British man from Southampton detailed the medical professionals who treated him in great detail to the surprise and belief of everyone his claims were further verified and proven to be accurate does this mean that dead people or those on the verge of death actually knew what was going on even after they were dead well medical professionals generally believe that a person's brain is only actively functioning for for about 30 seconds following their last heartbeat which is what happened to the corresponding man from Southampton however the study's administrators were able to piece together his descriptions to determine whether his experience had persisted even after three minutes and after all double checks claims seemed to last for about three minutes which is quite outstanding in the Intensive Care units of the participating hospitals unique picture boards were installed in a way that the only person who could see them was an observer floating on the ceiling due to their alignment the ceiling installations were positioned by the study's designers in locations that out-of-body experiencers frequently identify there were about a thousand of these panels set up altogether yet it was so sad that about 78 percent of all patients were resuscitated in a space that was devoid of the necessary pictures and symbols at the time this also applied to the two participants who were present and reported their audio-visual perceptions of the resuscitation procedures finally none of the study participants were able to recall anything regarding the subsequent ceiling installations because they weren't resuscitated where the picture boards were placed the aware study which implies awareness during resuscitation examines the brain and Consciousness during Cardiac Arrest including evaluating the veracity of perceptions during the out-of-body portion of near-death experiences as the lead researcher Dr Sam parnia is responsible for putting together a unique team of devoted forward thinkers and world-class professionals who undoubtedly help him achieve the results the initial findings from the study's first four years were released in December and were published in the medical journal 140 of the 2060 patients who experienced cardiac arrests throughout the study survived and were able to be interviewed nine patients with an nodes were found among the 101 patients who had gone through interviews two of the nine empty ears had special memories and were conscious of their surroundings one end Year's experience was confirmed to be true but the other was too unwell to participate in a thorough interview further confirmation of awareness was not feasible because these two ndes took place in non-acute locations without a visual goal it is necessary to do additional research and possibly re-evaluate the methods and objectives of the study a fascinating feature of the aware study however didn't provide the outcomes that had been anticipated in the lead up to the research series what was the outcome of the aware study the major goals of the aware study are to establish a methodology to verify the veracity of claims a visual and auditory perception during cardiac arrest and to examine the prevalence of Consciousness and the range of mental experiences during CA resuscitation 2060 patients from 15 institutions in the UK the U.S and Austria were investigated throughout the first four years of the study which started in 2008 interviews with survivors of cardiac arrest were conducted in three stages the first was to ascertain the existence of memories or perceptions from the ca secondly to ascertain whether the Recollections or perceptions constituted in nde with or without auditory or visual awareness and finally to ascertain the veracity of any auditory visual impressions of the physical environments that were experienced during the nde at each Hospital 50 to 100 shelves were placed close to the ceiling of areas where ca resuscitation was expected to to take place in order to evaluate the veracity of claims of visual awareness an image that could only be seen from above each shelf was systematically placed if enough ndes emerged in which individual patients had visual awareness from a vantage point that was high enough to sufficiently see the image the photos on the shelves would be able to verify the veracity of the claims of accurate VA according to the study's hypothesis only 140 of the 2060 study participants survived and were healthy enough to participate in a stage one interview 39 of these 140 candidates largely due to exhaustion could not complete the stage 2 interview only nine of the remaining 101 patients who had stage 2 interviews were determined to have experienced an nodes and only two of these nine ND years mentioned memories of auditory or visual awareness of the outside world unfortunately one of these two was unable to proceed with a thorough stage 3 interview owing to Ill illness the impressions of CA occurrences in the other patients were confirmed the patient actually experienced a lot of euphoria during the node as he said he could hear voices he said he heard a machine voice saying shocked the patient according to the patient he stood up close to the ceiling and peered down at his actual body the nurse and another man who was bald and quite a chunky gentleman dressed in blue scrubs and a blue hat because of the location of the Hat the patient could see the man was bald to further confirm that he was conscious the patient recognized the bald man who assisted him during the resuscitation the following day the identification of the guy who performed the resuscitation was supported by the medical record which also attested to the use of an AED that would have provided the automated instructions the patient would have heard sadly further examination of the accuracy of va was not possible because both cases of CA and ndes with auditory visual awareness took place in non-acute parts of the hospital without shelves conclusively the study's authors came to the following consensus that in a few instances of cardiac arrest memories of visual awareness consistent with so-called out-of-body experiences May match actual occurrences also some anti-ears may have vivid near-death experiences but they may not remember them as a result of brain damage or the impact of sedative medicines on memory Pathways a true impartial investigation deserves to be conducted into the recalled experience surrounding the death considering the one instance of cardiac arrest that was timed and validated using auditory stimuli paranoia came to the conclusion that it was very much significant as it has generally been considered that these experiences are likely hallucinations or Illusions happening either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully revived but not an experience coinciding with real events while the heart isn't beating in this example there was no heartbeat speed for 3 minutes and Consciousness and awareness seemed to occur during that time this is counterintuitive because the brain usually stops working 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stops and doesn't start up again until the heart starts again also the specific accounts of visual awareness in this case were congruent with the events that were corroborated so even though it was difficult to verify Beyond a doubt the truth or significance of the patient's experiences and claims of Consciousness it was also impossible to refute them and additional research is required in this area it is obvious that the remembered incident involving the death now justifies additional impartial sincere examination Dr pernio has pioneered Research into the remembered experiences of death over the past 20 years focusing particularly on people who survived Cardiac Arrest the groundbreaking parnia lab investigation to where one and aware two closely explored the experiences of hundreds of cardiac arrest patients who had bio logically passed the threshold of death before being revived several survivors described having clear organized mental processes which was only one of the fascinating results after meeting their deceased relatives they discussed how they had treated others throughout their life and many of them remembered specifics of how they had been revived the National Institutes of Health became interested in the lab's compelling study after discovering paradoxical Lucidity a similar but less well-known phenomenon among individuals with severe dementia caretakers frequently described that these patients start to experience sporadic bursts of verbal and cognitive Clarity especially as they get closer to the end of their lives how you maintain Lucidity when the brain is thought to not be functional is the common unanswered question for each of these fields of study according to Dr parnia a significant portion of those who experience this have end-stage severe dementia and may have been completely Lucid for years Dr parnia and colleagues worked tirelessly to develop the first definition and measurement scale for the pl phenomenon as part of a five-year National Institute on an aging Grant the resultant outcome is that it is possible to discover novel avenues for clarity in dementia patients we might be able to develop novel therapies for mental illnesses and gain a deeper comprehension of the cognitive experience of dying or how it feels to approach death which could indeed Advance several goals Dr parnia's team worked with geriatrics and dementia Specialists from NYU langone including Lindsay J goren MD assistant professor of Neurology Psychiatry and Rehabilitation medicine and Joshua chodash MD the Michael L Friedman professor of geriatric research and professor of population Health several professionals from other organizations such as the Hospice Services of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York also took part together they successfully monitor roughly 500 terminally sick dementia patients with a week or less to live each subject would be attached to an in-home video electroencephalography device by the researchers which simultaneously records video and audio of the patient while measuring brain electrical activity Dr parnia explained that this adaptation in technology would allow them to be watching the patients so if a sign was ever seen that looks like paradoxical or terminal Lucidity it could be captured so that they could understand what it looks and sounds like as well as the underlying brain indicators that no one has ever understood in addition carers will be required to complete a symptomatic diary or patient logs of their observations for the Innovative study and to note any incidences they believe to be suggestive of PL in their loved ones the researchers will then review the EEG data to determine if any electrocortical biomarkers may be used to predict brain activity before during or after a period of PL these Lucid episodes may be associated with spikes in electrocortical activity According to some findings which may provide mechanistic insights and biological plausibility for PL in severe dementia that could be important because according to Dr parnia if they could find some structural change then they might be able to use that as a novel therapeutic Target for people who frequently suffer from Dementia or some other Consciousness disorders by maybe activating the circuit or giving them more Lucidity so what actually happens when you die your most vital organs stop keeping you alive at the time of death meaning that they failed to keep you alive many people think that death is instant however this study reveals that death is more of a gradual process the precise moment of death is frequently only one stage of a longer process called dying during which your body gradually shuts down when the time comes being prepared with knowledge of what to expect before during and even after death can help you deal with the experience what really happens to your physical body after death when a person passes away their physical body has ceased to function as a lining entity meaning that one's final breath is taken away your heart ceases to beat your mind freezes and your liver and kidneys among other important organs stop functioning when all these organs shut down it renders all of your body's systems incapable of continuing the usual activities known as living this study reveals that even death is a process it is simpler to comprehend the changes your body experiences as it passes from life to death when you think of death as a series of dying occurrences Your Existence depends on bodily functions that are in operation from the moment you take a breath until the moment you die the final necessary function that your body performs for you is dying how long does it take to die the fact remains that each person has a unique chronology your condition the medications you're taking and the reason for death will all affect how long it takes for your body to pass away for instance if abrupt Cardiac Arrest is left untreated death can occur within minutes when you have a chronic long-term illness it could take your body weeks or even months to pass away heart disease chronic lung disease and cancer are among the leading causes of death in the world but are frequently curable the different therapies we have in our world today both postpone death and lengthen the dying process it becomes simpler to spot typical warning signals of impending death as a result of this slowdown what happens to your body before death your body's vital processes begin to deteriorate and eventually stop when you have a chronic illness or die naturally however before you die your body May begin to experience some of the following you experience less physical activity and more sleep you don't sleep to rejuvenate your body and mind as you approach death instead you fall asleep as a result of a lack of energy in your body your body's ability to circulate oxygen-rich blood is reduced by your heart summarily if you aren't getting enough oxygen the cells in your body will lack the energy to keep you awake and active for extended periods rest is a crucial component of dying you experience decreased appetite and thirst a body that is dying doesn't require as much nutrition as a body that isn't dying in the few days weeks or months leading up to your death your appetite May drastically decline you can find it more difficult for your digestive system to metabolize the food you eat you might eventually stop having an appetite from the onset children are taught by caretakers from the moment they are born that receiving care or food is both an act of love and survival your loved ones might suggest that you eat because of this when it's appropriate to use artificial feeding technology such as a feeding tube and when food could be excessively large for your digestive system to manage your Healthcare practitioner can provide advice you experience difficulty controlling your bowel and bladder you can have trouble passing stool as your digestive system slows down constipation is a typical sign of terminal illness your pelvic floor muscles which control when you urinate may also be less under your control however constipation can be relieved using stool softeners should you have a problem controlling your stool your bed can stay tidy if you use supplies like incontinence pads and medical equipment like Foley catheters which assist you to urinate you experience deterioration of your skin and muscles when you're gradually dying it's normal to lose weight in muscular Mass even talking while lying in bed might cause your muscles to become exhausted your skin thins because new skin cells don't replace dying ones as quickly Cuts bruising and bed sores are more likely to occur in those with thin skin in order to prevent your skin from staying in touch with your bed for an extended period your Healthcare professional and loved ones can reposition you and check your skin for infections they can frequently hydrate your skin to help you Shield it from harm you begin to detach and withdraw from things as you're dying it's typical to show less interest in things you once loved you could favor Solitude over social interaction it is not a sign of a diminished love for friends or family if you crave less social engagement it may just be a dying sign as your body evolves so do your needs you experience irregular vital signs blood pressure respiration rate temperature and pulse are examples of your Vital Signs these figures represent the condition of your brain heart and other life-supporting organs your body temperature declines as you approach death and your skin may feel clammy or cold to the touch when your organs fight to keep you alive even as you're on the verge of passing away other ones may be irregular or unpredictable your breathing rate will gradually slow as you get closer to the end you begin to experience unnecessary agitation after extended stretches of Slumber sudden spurts of energy or a Restless mood May indicate that death is imminent you'd probably believe strongly that you are capable of things that you were not you might even try to get out of bed or take any necessary medical equipment like an IV sometimes you can lose patience with those who are trying to take care of you changes in how you perceive your surroundings it's possible that your brain no longer processes sensory data in the same way a noise that once appeared natural for example can now seem ominous or frightening you could begin to see things that others don't appear to notice it's possible that these perception changes are more obvious at night than during the day According to some research your brain releases an increase in chemicals as death draws near heightening your perceptions and maybe causing you to experience hyper reality for instance dying individuals frequently describe seeing a brilliant light or they could imagine themselves embarking on a journey to meet up with a loved one who has passed away you experience periods of unconsciousness you might fall asleep and become unconscious as your death draws near similar to going into a coma or dreaming and you might not even remember being unconscious when you wake up later according to research you might still be able to hear your loved one's voices and feel their reassuring touches as your body drifts into Slumber because the final sense is to leave at death are the sense of touch and hearing you experience changes in your breathing how near to death you are can be determined by your respiratory patterns unpredictable breathing is frequently a symptom of ill health or death whereas regular steady breathing is a sign of life and good health you might stop breathing for longer periods as death approaches as you breathe you might hear a rattling sound often referred to as a death rattle if saliva has accumulated in the back of your throat this happens because the muscles there aren't strong enough to allow you to swallow you'll eventually take your last breath what really happens to your body during death your body's critical processes completely halt when you die first the breath stops the brain follows and then the heart stops beating research shows that a person's brain could still be active for some minutes even after medical professionals have pronounced him or her dead yet brain activity is distinct from Consciousness or awareness however this doesn't mean that the dead knows what is going on around them or is conscious of their passing some death symptoms include breathlessness feeling no pulse unresponsive reflexes to testing and pupils that do not enlarge or dilate in response to intense light what happens to your body after death after you pass away your body goes through several changes as it adapts to its new situation some of these changes include your body temperature Falls below normal just within an hour of passing your body temperature drops by around 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit which is equivalent to negative 16.9444 degrees Celsius your body temperature will eventually equal that of your environment your muscles become relaxed as soon as you die your muscles start to relax relieving any pressure on your bowels and bladder because of this many people pee and poop as they pass away also if your skin is sagging it will be simpler to see the underbone structure of your body your body experiences downward pressure on your blood after death it may feel as if your blood is forced toward the Earth and lowered by gravity and in the areas where blood gathers your skin may appear purplish red your body experiences stiffness in the initial stage of stiffness the face and neck areas of your body become rigid the rigidity progressively spreads from the center of your body to your arms legs and finally your toes and fingers you experience relaxation once more your body's tissue begins to degrade just a few days later which causes the stiff areas to relax once more does the dyeing process really hurt well whether it hurts or not varies and depends on the individual both life and death may be accompanied by pain you may feel a variety of pain Sensations in death just as you experience numerous forms of pain in life ranging from the type of pain to how powerful it seems how you die and whether or not you have access to painkillers will both play a big part in your situation in their final moments bodies frequently struggle to survive without proper medication the possibility of survival in our bodies is very low for instance when a body is losing a life-threatening amount of blood it will instantly shift the scarce blood flow to the most important organs these organs remain alive because of this reaction however the blood-starved body parts like your legs and arms could feel pain medical personnel is better prepared and equipped to try to save your life and decrease your discomfort in real emergencies like these experts and medical practitioners who provide Hospice Care are especially skilled in ensuring you're comfortable and feel cared for while you pass away they are aware of your body's pain producing survival mechanisms and offer soothing medications to help.