The TRIP You Take When You Die - What Really Happens In The Final Moments

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for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out after you purchase it will ask you where you heard about them and please support our show and tell them our show sent you for decades a shadowy organization called the eliminati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows look around lemon forward sodas even lemon forward songs we ran the tracks slowed them down reversed them and squeezed out the truth that's lemon propaganda right there but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda join the seven uprising flip the sip every town has a dark side most of us will experience this at least once in our lives standing in a quiet room with the lights dimmed machines humming softly in the background there's nothing dramatic happening no clear moment you can point to just a body lying still a chest rising and falling and people speaking in the background and people talking in the background in low voices because it feels wrong not to and at some point inevitably someone asked the question everyone is thinking but nobody really wants to say out loud are they still here and not their body and not their heartbeat them we like to imagine death as a clean line one second you're aware and the next you're not but if you've ever actually been in that room you know it doesn't feel quite that simple hey guys it's andrew and thanks for tuning in to this episode of every town where today we're exploring death and the probability that it might not be the end in the way we come to know it and the science is evolving and the reality is that no matter how many monitors are hooked up no matter how experienced the doctors are nobody can tell you exactly when you leave or what happens next this is the mystery of the life last moment normally this is where i tell you the name of a place a city a neighborhood a street corner where something irreversible happened but today's episode it's different this isn't about a murder or disappearance it's about something every town shares every hospital every hospice wing every family that's ever gathered around a bed and waited this is about death and the uncomfortable or possibly comforting possibility that it may not be the end of consciousness in the way we've always assumed because no matter who you ask nobody actually knows for certain what happens to us not the doctors not the philosophers and not the religious leaders who speak with certainty we've built elaborate theories of course and run thousands of studies mapped brain activity down to individual neurons firing and still we don't know but something might have the answer and it's not from the source you'd probably expect you oscar arrived at steer house in 2005 as a kitten part of a therapy program that introduced animals into the dimension care unit and five other cats came with them they were meant to provide comfort warmth and presence in a place where people's minds were slowly slipping away oscar is not the friendliest cat he's become a little more friendly over time when he first arrived here you would have trouble finding him and that's what made his eventual behavior even more remarkable for months he seemed like a failed experiment in animal therapy but then the staff started noticing a pattern oscar would suddenly appear in certain rooms he'd curl up beside residents who didn't seem any different from anyone else on the floor these patients weren't actively dying not in any way the nurses could measure their breathing was steady and their vital signs were stable they were sick yes but they didn't seem to be dying as much as they were when they first arrived in the hospital if you stood at the foot of the bed you'd think they still had time but oscar knew something they didn't it happened so often it stopped feeling like coincidence that's when dr david dosa a geriatrician working with patients at steer house started documenting what happened when oscar quote-unquote picked someone and the pattern it was consistent in a way that didn't sit right not days hours sometimes it was less than 60 minutes from the moment the cat settled beside a resident to the moment their heart stopped he only stays with patients if they really are at the end of life he will come into a room he has been known to jump on the windowsill and sit there for hours on end occasionally he will jump on the bed and curl up next to a patient and he'll be there for hours on end and he'll be there for hours on end and he'll be there until the very end after about 25 deaths the staff stopped treating oscar like a quirky hospice mascot started treating him like an indicator when he showed up they'd call families immediately and they'd do it carefully because nobody wanted to sound superstitious they couldn't promise an exact time and they wouldn't call it a prediction but they'd say based on the cat's name they'd be very close and they were almost never wrong by the time oscar died in 2022 at 17 years old he'd kept vigil beside more than 100 people in their final hours with an accuracy rate that beat anything human observation could match nurses would check a patient and see no obvious signs of decline and assume they still had time and then oscar would appear and within hours they'd be calling the morgue so oscar died in 2022 at 17 years old he'd kept vigil beside more than 100 what was really happening the simplest explanation is scent and cats have anywhere from 45 to 200 million olfactory receptors humans in comparison have about 5 million and research has shown that illness can alter body chemistry in ways that release specific volatile organic compounds in plain language something changes and it smells so that's why dogs can sometimes detect cancer why insects can sense decomposition from far away so maybe oscar was picking up on chemical shifts that happen right before death changes subtle enough that no monitor catches them but obvious to an animal built to live by its nose and the problem is that explanation works right up until you start paying attention to the details first there's the timing oscar didn't show up after measurable decline began he arrived before breathing patterns shifted or blood pressure dropped before any of the standard clinical markers that signal someone has entered active death in other words he wasn't reacting to what was happening he was anticipating what was about to happen the second detail matters just as much see oscar never stayed once death occurred remember oscar never stayed once death occurred this was not a cat known for affection. He wasn't there to comfort grieving families and he didn't linger. The moment a patient died, Oscar got up and left the room. Whatever he'd been responding to, whatever drew him to that specific person at that specific time, vanished the instant their breathing stopped. Which suggests he wasn't reacting to death itself. He was reacting to something that exists only in the transition. That narrow space between alive and not alive. something that appears right before the end and disappears just as quickly. So, the question remains, what could that cat possibly have been sensing? We like to believe our senses give us an accurate picture of reality. And they do, but it's only our reality, not the entire picture of what's actually happening all around us. Humans, we operate within an incredibly narrow band of perception. And we know this because, for example, dogs can hear frequencies up to 60,000 hertz. Humans top out around 20,000. Bees, they can see ultraviolet light and we can't. That means flowers to them appear totally different than they do to us. Elephants. Elephants are another one. They communicate through ground vibrations that travel for miles. That list, it goes on and on. Entire layers of reality are happening around us all the time. Layers we simply don't have the equipment to detect. Researchers have found that the chemical signature of dying appears before a physical shutdown. In hospice patients, specific compounds begin showing up in breath and skin emissions hours before death. The body. The body starts signaling that something critical is about to fail, broadcasting warnings in a language humans don't understand, but animals perhaps read effortlessly. And maybe that's all Oscar the cat was doing, reading the chemical billboard that says, System Failure Imminent. In 2023, researchers at the University of Michigan published findings that unsettled a lot of people in medicine. They've been monitoring the disease, and they've been finding that the disease is not as bad as it used to be. And they've been monitoring the disease, and they've been finding that the disease is not as bad as it used to be. They've been monitoring four comatose patients using continuous electron cephalogram recordings, EEGs, basically tracking brain activity as life support was withdrawn. And two of the patients, well they did something no one was expecting. Within seconds of their ventilators being removed, their brain showed a sudden surge of activity. Gamma waves, the fastest type of brain oscillation, spiked across specific regions, forming patterns that were highly organized and synchronized. And different parts of the brain began communicating with each other in ways normally associated with conscious thought, memory, and sensory processing. And that wasn't supposed to happen. Gamma waves are typically seen when a person is awake and mentally engaged, when they're involved in attention, perception, and awareness. When someone loses consciousness, those signals usually fade. So, seeing them emerge in dying brains was like walking past a dark house everyone believed was empty and finding every room suddenly lit up with a party inside. And those surges lasted anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes. Most of the activity centered in what neuroscientists call the posterior hut zone. And this region plays a role in visual processing, body awareness, memory integration, and the sense of self. It's also the area most often linked to reports of out-of-body experiences. And that raised a problem. Why would a brain on the brink of death suddenly become more active and not less? Why wouldn't it just fade away and give up? Why would it organize, synchronize, and burn through energy at the very moment oxygen delivery had completely stopped? Under normal conditions, the brain already consumes about 20%. Of the body's total energy. Generating a burst of gamma activity after the heart has stopped is metabolically expensive. From a survival standpoint, it makes no sense. Unless the brain isn't actually shutting down. Unless, in those final moments, it's doing something else that we don't know about and can't perceive. Dr. Gimo Borjigin, who led the research, offered a tentative explanation. She suggested the surge might represent a kind of internal scan. The brain reaching backward into memory, searching for reasons to keep going. A final fight, so to speak. And people who survive near-death experiences often describe something similar. They talk about their lives flashing before their eyes. And I know that sounds. Sounds like a movie cliché. But when you listen closely to these accounts, many of them describe something more detailed than a highlight reel. Not every near-death experience is identical. But their commonality is quite striking. For instance, one thing is that people see light at the end of the tunnel, or bright light. People experience an out-of-body experience. Feeling their bodies floating in the air, maybe even looking at themselves. Their own body from the ceiling, a different vantage point. They often describe a sense of calm, of clarity, of understanding that feels broader than normal awareness. Which you could expect, I guess, if your brain were working on all cylinders. Everything would be put into extreme focus. The problem is, we have no way of knowing this for sure. People who have had NDEs can tell us their experience, but that's as far as it goes. The two patients in the Michigan study never regained consciousness. They didn't survive long enough to describe what, if anything, they experienced during that surge of activity. For all we know, it was nothing. The electrical patterns could have been meaningless noise, and biological static as systems failed catastrophically. Or, they experienced something profound. Something that simply couldn't be reported, because the experience ended in chaos. Or, they experienced something that could have been worse than death. The thing is, medical science can explain almost everything about how the body works. We understand circulation, respiration, digestion. We've mapped the human genome. We transplant organs. We edit genes with astonishing precision. But we still can't explain why it feels like something to be you. Philosophers call this the heart of the human body. It's a hard problem of consciousness. Not how the brain processes information. We're getting pretty good at that. But why there's a subjective experience attached at all. Why there's an inner world. A point of view. A sense of, I'm here. You can damage the brain and lose specific functions. Get into an accident and then you can't speak or walk. Or you lose your vision. Or your cognitive skills fade. There are even instances of traumatic brain injuries. Suddenly a person can play the piano with an amazing ability. Even though they never played before. Or they become a whiz at math. And yet, it seems that no matter what happens to the brain. The sense of being someone. Of existing from a first person perspective. Always persists. Consciousness, as we know it, doesn't seem to live anywhere specific. It isn't a structure you can point to on an MRI. You can't isolate it, weigh it, or remove it. The dominant scientific view is that it's an emergent property. Something that arises from the complex interactions of billions of neurons working together. But the truth is, that's still just a theory. On the other side of that coin, some researchers and philosophers have suggested that consciousness may not be created by the brain at all. That the brain might function more like a receiver. Tuning in to something that exists independently. Rather than generating it from scratch. And if that were true, well, death wouldn't end consciousness itself. It would only end the brain's ability to access it. I'm not saying that's the answer. But the fact that we can't rule it out, at least not yet. Says more about how little we still understand than most of us are comfortable admitting. That perhaps, we're all part of something much larger. And when we die. We gain. We gain access to whatever that larger thing is. In order to function as a society, we've constructed legal definitions around when death occurs. Because we need clear boundaries. Organ donation. Estate inheritance. Criminal liability. All require specificity. We don't need a specific moment when someone transitions from alive to dead. But biology doesn't respect our bureaucratic need for precision. Death is messy. It's gradual. And different parts of the body shut down at different rates. Brain cells can survive for minutes after the heart stops. Some cellular activity continues for hours after someone is declared dead. There have even been many documented cases of people declaring other people dead. And then. They suddenly die. come back alive. The point is, we're not always even accurate in knowing when death occurs. Maybe death isn't a moment at all. Maybe it's a gradient, a spectrum we slide along and consciousness doesn't simply blink out at some arbitrary point on that spectrum. Maybe the transition is longer, more complex, and more layered than we've allowed ourselves to consider. And if that's true, well, there's another phenomenon that might be connected to all of this. Every culture has its ghost stories, and when you strip away the specific myths, the religious frameworks, the Hollywood effects, something surprisingly consistent remains. Ghosts aren't usually described as violent or malicious. They're rarely portrayed as entities trying to hurt anyone. And more often, they're confused. They repeat the same actions over and over. They move through familiar spaces without acknowledging the living. They appear unaware that anyone else is even there at all. They show up in places that clearly mattered to them once. Homes, stairwells, hospitals, stretches of road, performing fragments of routines that appear unfinished. They don't behave like conscious beings with intent. They behave more like recordings, like echoes bouncing off walls, like something replaying and not responding. And so, here's a thought. I'm not claiming this is provable, it's just a possibility worth sitting with. What if ghosts aren't spirits of the dead trying to communicate or haunt the living? What if they are consciousness that continues after death, but no longer aligns cleanly, with physical reality? Not trapped or suffering, just existing in a state that only occasionally overlaps with ours. Briefly, imperfectly, and without awareness of the interaction. In that framework, a haunting wouldn't be supernatural at all. It would be interference. Like static on a radio when two stations bleed into one another. Two systems that normally operate independently, rushing up against one another at the edges for a moment. And that would explain something important. Why ghost encounters are almost always frustrating. Why there are no clear messages, no revelations, no answers, no clear photos. Just fragments gone before you can fully observe or understand what it is you're seeing. The three dimensions we experience in daily life are length, width, and height. But physics tells us there may be far more dimensions than just that. Physicists can describe them mathematically, make a model how they might behave, run simulations, and make predictions. But we still can't perceive them. We're locked into our own dimensional experience, like fish trying to imagine what it means to fly. The math may say those other dimensions exist, but our senses give us no access to them. Most of the time, they may as well not be there at all. Except, maybe sometimes they are. Under conditions we don't yet understand, there could be brief moments of overlap. Glitches where separate layers of reality brush against each other for just a second before pulling apart again. If that's true, then ghost sightings are just as important. If that's true, then ghost sightings might be exactly what they look like once you strip away the fear and the folklore. Fleeting glimpses of something real that exists just outside our normal range of perception. Not proof of the supernatural, just evidence of how limited our senses really are. Just like trying to see infrared with human eyes, or hear a frequency meant for a dog whistle. Because the truth is, reality is far stranger than what we're equipped to notice. And we just forget that most of the time. Right now, as you're watching or listening to this, radio waves are passing straight through your body. Neutrinos from the sun are streaming through the earth by the trillions, barely interacting with anything at all. Gravitational waves from black holes colliding billions of light years away are rippling through space-time itself. You can't feel any of it, but it's all measurably, verifiably happening. There's a lot out there we're not built to perceive, and once you accept that, the idea that vast parts of reality exist beyond our senses, the question stops being, how could something like this exist, and become something much quieter? Why would we assume we'd be able to notice it at all? What I'm saying is that every single sense we have is basically a limited instrument, picking up just a little bit of everything. Picking up just a tiny fraction of what actually exists out there. And yet we base our entire understanding of reality, our whole conception of what's real and what's not real, on this incredibly incomplete data set. So why is it so difficult to imagine that consciousness might operate in a range we simply can't detect with our current equipment? That after death, awareness continues but shifts into a frequency or dimension that our living brains just aren't built to access? In the end, the idea that consciousness might continue after death tends to split people in two. Some find it comforting, others deeply unsettling. If it does continue, then death isn't a clean ending but a transition. And transitions are messy and uncertain. There's no proof that consciousness survives death, but there's also no proof that it doesn't. What we do have are strange observations that don't fit neatly into our models, unexplained animal behavior, unexpected brain activity at the moment of death, and near-death experiences reported across cultures. Maybe death is the end, or maybe it's a shift into something we just can't yet understand. So that's it for today's episode of Everytown. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more from us, we'll go check out our exclusive vaults collection where we have over 200 episodes you can pick and choose from over at patreon.com slash scarymysteries. And remember to come on back here next week for another episode of Everytown filled with strange and mysterious stories. Because you never know, maybe your town will be next. you