This is on top of alcoholics being alcoholics and drinking whatever could maximize the alcohol to cost ratio, of which cheap absinthe was probably the most effective option in Europe at the time, being a very high proof spirit in general. Because of its popularity, a lot of the distilling of cheap absinthe was slapdash and sometimes done at home, where the distillers wouldn't know that you needed to pour off the quantity of methanol that comes out at the beginning of distillation. Absinthe became really popular in France during the phylloxera epidemic, where the vast majority of European vineyards were destroyed. The early "hallucination" accusations were actually related to methanol poisoning and plain-old heavy intoxication from ethanol. Thujone is technically psychoactive however, your liver would dissolve from alcohol poisoning long before you felt anything from drinking absinthe. “Much of my future research will focus on the role of the brain in cardiac arrest, including covert consciousness.The entire hallucination thing was a pernicious myth developed for political reasons in the late 19th and early 20th century. “Producing an internal state of consciousness (NDE) cannot be its sole function when survival is truly at stake,” she concluded. Then, why would a dying brain be activated? What is the function of brain activation at near-death?” “Our data reveals that the dying brain is far from hypoactive. “What excites me most is to probe the role of the brain in cardiac arrest from these studies,” Borjigin said. This line of research could shed light on the deeply mysterious phenomena of near-death experiences, which have sparked widespread fascination among experts and the public alike. To solve these riddles, Borjigin and her colleagues plan to collect more observations of dying brains, which might help to expose the underlying meaning of these gamma surges. “The activation patterns differed even among the two patients does this mean the two patients had somewhat different subjective experiences internally at their final moments? What exact EEG features correlate with ‘seeing light’ or ‘seeing relatives,’ ‘out-of-body sensation’ or ‘life review? How are these potential sensory percepts encoded back to the brain for later recall if they survived? These are all unsolved questions in need of further studies and in need of funding support to do so.” “The gamma activation in the dying patients was detected in only two patients this needs to be confirmed in more patients,” Borjigin said. For instance, the brains of dying rats were active in all EEG channels, while the human brains were active at specific frequencies. However, the patterns and intensity of the brain waves contained some unexpected details that will need to be examined in future research. Given her work on animal models, Borjigin was not surprised that the dying human brain can also undergo a surge of activity. Both of those people had a history of seizures, which could account for the findings, though neither patient had experienced a seizure in the hour leading up to their deaths. It’s also not yet clear why only two of the four patients experienced gamma activity during death. More research will be needed to establish a link between death and gamma activity in the brain, in part because the study is based on a small sample size, making it difficult to draw broader conclusions. The findings could also help explain near-death experiences, which the study described as “a biological paradox that challenges our fundamental understanding of the dying brain, which is widely believed to be nonfunctioning” during death. The new observations “demonstrate that the surge of gamma power and connectivity observed in animal models of cardiac arrest can be observed in select patients during the process of dying,” according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During cardiac arrest, two of the people experienced complex gamma activity in a “hot zone” of the brain that is critical for conscious processing. The researchers examined EEG readings from a small sample size of four unresponsive patients who were removed from life support with the permission of their families. Now, Borjigin and her colleagues have discovered similar gamma activity in the brains of patients who died in the hospital while they were monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, which record neural activity. The surges consisted of gamma waves, the fastest oscillations in the brain, which are associated with conscious perceptions, lucid dreams, and hallucinations. ![]() Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, has been interested in these questions since she first observed surges of activity in the brains of dying rats a decade ago.
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