Name: It's way different than you think
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T18:10:59.000Z
Duration: 5 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

It's a question that many are curious, if not a little scared about, but scientists are now closer than ever to understanding what actually happens while you're dying.

Recently, researchers studied the brains and bodies of dying people to gain new insight into what it feels like as you die.

A recent meta-analysis found that most people in the Western world will die in medical institutions where the first sign of death is a loss of hunger and thirst.

Physicians call this the beginning of active dying, and it is caused by an intense feeling of relaxation where you will likely only be capable of handling small spoonfuls of food and water.

Step two of death, extreme fatigue and unconsciousness.

One study found that 72% of patients in this phase of death reported pre-death dreams involving reuniting with people who had already died. 59% said that they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere, and 28% dreamed of meaningful experiences from their past.

These pre-death dreams are happening because at this time you are mostly asleep and even dipping into unconsciousness.

This means that if someone tries to physically wake you up, nothing will happen.

The thing is, studies of unconscious patients show that when they did eventually wake up from being unconscious, they thought they were only just asleep.

Essentially, you are not going to be aware of going in and out of consciousness.

Some reports say that this stage of dying feels a bit like when you can't get out of bed from an intense cold or flu, but when you are dying, the sleep is no longer rejuvenating and the fatigue is consistent.

Because at times you are now unconscious, it's harder to plan for oral medications, so at this point you might be hooked up to syringe pumps or suppositories in order to get oral medications or dying aids before death.

At this point, studies show that your heart will beat less forcefully, your blood pressure will fall, and your organs, including your brain, will function less.

Essentially, your brain is trying to conserve energy as it slowly dies, and this causes your brain to lose the power of inhibition.

You may have heard people talking about seeing the light or moving towards the light during near-death experiences.

Brain studies on rats show that a dying brain's lack of inhibition causes the visual brain system to fire.

This has also been found in some human studies as well, which may explain why many people report this phenomenon of seeing light as their brain begins to die.

Known as the death rattle, an unconscious person's breathing still follows the automatic patterns generated by the respiratory system of their brain, but they don't have proper awareness of their mouth and throat, so saliva builds up.

The saliva in the back of the throat, mixed with the automatic quick breaths, creates loud breathing noises that many people will observe as disturbing, but it's important to note that the person dying is actually feeling no distress.

In fact, the reason that this is happening to the dying person is because physiologically, they are so relaxed.

A 2013 study on rat brains dying from cardiac arrest found that specific brain regions surged with synchronized low gamma waves more coherent than when the rats were alive and healthy.

The brain waves were similar to when rats were engaged in high-level cognitive activity.

This, of course, got researchers interested in what's happening to our brains as we die as well.

In humans, a study on 567 dying men and women had their brains scanned as they were being resuscitated with CPR.

It turns out that like the rats, the brains fired in intense ways, and those who survived the CPR reported lucid experiences such as perception of separation from the body, observing events with no pain or distress, a meaningful evaluation of their life, and assessing their own actions towards others throughout their life.

This is, again, all likely linked to the disinhibition of our brain as we die.

It was also found that this disinhibition caused the part of the brain involved in memory to light up, allowing some people to access stored memories, while other patients, when resuscitated, couldn't remember anything that had just happened to them, even though brain scans showed that their brains were firing in uninhibited, active ways.

Some of these patients reported knowing that they were dying, but also that they were going towards a place that felt like home.

One other study of a man's brain while dying found that his brain activation was similar to people who were on the psychedelic drug DMT.

But more recent studies found resuscitated dying people reported that what they had experienced right before death felt different than hallucinations, illusions, or even dreams.

But what are people thinking about before they die?

We actually did a whole podcast on the cognitive side of dying and people's experiences and advice for death.

Link here on screen and in the description over on our podcast channel side though.

Thank you so much for watching, and I said, peace.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

It's way different than you think

cognitive

intense

essentially

fatigue