Question: Does the brain remain active when you die?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:

We don’t know everything about what happens to the brain during death, or when someone gets very close to dying but manages to recover. One thing is certain: when someone’s heart stops beating, they don’t get any new oxygenated blood travelling to the brain. When the cells in the brain are starved of oxygen (and other stuff they need to function, such as energy) they become less and less efficient, until the point that they stop working altogether. Brain recordings of electrical activity between cells (called electrophysiology, or electroencephalography) have found that most of the time, activity just gets smaller and smaller until it stops. However, during this strange time of abnormal blood supply, sometimes, people’s brains show sudden peaks in brain activity during this (i.e. while they are dying) and this could be the source of “out of body” experiences people report when they come back from near-death.