Whether you believe it or not, there are millions (if not billions) around the world who believe there's more to our lives than just wandering around the surface of the Earth for a finite amount of time, eventually passing away. Many religions are built on the idea of life after death, and while death itself is an inevitability, no one has really been able to prove what happens after we take our last breath.
There's plenty of science looking into the concept of life after death, and unlike the fictionalized movie Flatliners, there's some actual evidence that the end might not be the end. Now, one scientist suggests he’s found evidence of us having a ‘soul’ - seemingly capturing the moment our consciousness leaves our bodies.
Dr Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona and conducted a recent study into the brain activity of clinically dead patients.
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By placing sensors on the brains of seven patients who had just minutes left to live, Hameroff monitored their blood pressure and heart until they dropped to zero and they were declared deceased.
The interesting part is that an electroencephalogram (EEG) seemingly seemed to capture a strange burst of energy that occurred shortly after death.
Speaking to Project Unity, Hameroff explained: "They saw everything go away and then [psh] you got this activity when there was no blood pressure, no heart rate."
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“So that could be the near-death experience, or it could be the soul leaving the body, perhaps."
According to Hameroff, this burst of activity is called gamma synchrony and is a wave patter that's typically linked to our conscious thought, awareness, and perception.”
Saying that it's picked up on the EEG for between 30 and 90 seconds, it vanishes when the patient is clinically dead.
Hameroff maintains that consciousness happens at a 'quantum level', saying it comes from tiny structures in brain cells called microtubules instead of just large-scale electrical signals that fire between neurons.
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The research suggests that this might be why we still have some sense of awareness in states like anesthesia and deep sleep. The bursts are likely explained as a side effect of the brain being deprived of oxygen.
Although Hameroff admits the EEG spike could be an 'illusion', he also argues that it might be our consciousness leaving our body. He adds: "The point is it shows that consciousness is actually, probably, a very low energy process."
Dr. Lakhmir Chawla apparently pioneered this kind of studying with EEG, using it to ensure there's no brain activity in brain-dead patients who are giving organs. Does everyone have a 'soul’ though? Hameroff concluded: "This has been a fairly reproducible event, not 100% like 50% of patients show this when you measure it."
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We're not quite at the stage where we can say Pixar's Soul is more fact than fiction, but studies like this definitely have us questioning what we thought we knew about our last moment being tethered to our fleshy bodies.