It was well-known before Borjigin’s work that the brain fires lots of neurons before death but it wasn’t known that the neurons secrete vast amounts of a new chemical leading to a seemingly hallucinogenic response.
According to Borjigin, cardiac arrest survivors report having an “amazing experience in their brain” where they see lights and everything is “realer than real”.
“My impression is that this is not a coma, a state of unconsciousness, as many families and clinicians think, but something like a dream state.”
However, it has been hard to pinpoint when this happens but he said it is “like a storm coming in”.
“The waves started coming up. But you can never say, well, when did the waves start coming up?…The waves get higher and higher, and eventually, they carry the person out to sea.”
