According to a team of scientists in New York, the human brain is still very active after death, which means there's a chance you could actually hear your own death being announced by medics someday.
Dr. Sam Parnia and her colleagues from New York University Langone School of Medicine have been studying patients who have theoretically died from cardiac arrest or a heart attack -- meaning their hearts stopped -- and were later revived.
But according to Dr. Parnia, in several cases, patients who have been "brought back" were able to recollect conversations and visual details that were going on, while technically being dead, that were later verified by medics who were present at the time.
“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working; they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them,” Dr. Parnia explained.
Dr. Parnia and his team are now using recollections like these to get a clearer understanding of the strange phenomena that takes place inside the human brain after death.
"In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of 'love', for instance, we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death," Dr. Parnia said, "because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die."
