Last Seven Minutes - Ananya Bhardwaj (Week 13)
You die with your heart, not your mind.
Death is declared when your heart stops beating, not when your brain stops functioning. It’s not confirmed to be exactly a “seven-minute window,” but there’s a common belief that after being declared dead, brains still function for around seven minutes.
So yes, literally, you die with your heart and not your mind.
Brain activity in areas that deal with dreams and alternate states of consciousness rapidly increase after death. Many believe that in these final few moments, a person relives their entire life. The day you were born to the day you leave, experienced in a matter of minutes.
There’s the chilling theory that you may be experiencing those final minutes right now; you see all of your life flashing before you, with the same emotional vulnerability and sense of wonder—or lack thereof, depending on the person.
Make those memories count—make sure the moments that truly matter stay in your brain and your heart forever. My last blog was about how there’s a power in feeling; I want to continue on that train of thought to argue that feeling everything and being unafraid of your own emotions creates the most impactful memories. Not to reduce emotions down to science, but for the most part, they are chemical reactions in your brain. So in those final moments, if you do really relive those chemical reactions, you can feel your own strength. You can feel the power of your humanity, you can feel everything that comprises your life and your identity.
Find beauty, however you define it to be. Look at the faces of your loved ones long and hard; look at paintings and sculptures, play video games, read books. Make sure to find those ultimate highs and ultimate lows, so that you’ll have something worth remembering just before you go.
You die with your heart, not your mind.
Hi Ananya! This was so beautifully written, and I love the topic you chose. Since none of us have died, I guess we can’t really know for a fact if we see our most important memories before death—but there seems to be a lot of scientific evidence in support of this idea.
ReplyDeleteI also found your starting and ending sentence interesting, since I’ve only ever heard of brain death as the legal and medical definition of dying; there is no recovery or chance of coming back from it, regardless if the heart is still beating or not. Because of this, I was initially confused by your claim that you die with your heart, not with your mind. But after reading your blog, the way you defined and phrased it seemed so poetic. Your ending message about creating positive memories for your future dying self to recall was powerful.
Hi Michelle! I was referring to clinical death—which is focused on blood circulation and heart function—but you're absolutely right about the brain and legal death part. I wanted to focus more on personal terminology rather than official definitions, and defining people as who they are through their emotional experiences (this is my best attempt at a cover up for not researching death enough).
DeleteHey Ananya! I love how you explored the idea that people see a flashback of their lives in seven minutes and connected it with the idea that we die when our heart stop. I really wish we could know if it is true that the seven minutes happen; but no one has come alive after dying so I guess we will never know. Anyways, I think the way you continued your last blog's concept into this is nice. The continuity allows for a good expansion of the importance of feelings in our life.
ReplyDeleteI don't like emotions. They really suck, since sometimes you feel happy ones but a lot of the time it just makes people feel bad. I kind of discussed that in my blog this week, so I like how you take the more optimistic view on this. Your blog is making me think about my opinion on emotions and is slightly changing my perspective on it.
Hi Ananya! Your blog had this wonderfully eerie yet lovely take on memory and consciousness. The idea that we might be reliving our lives in those final few minutes is terrifying but poetic—like one last chance to hold on to everything that ever mattered. It makes me wonder if those moments exist like a dream or if they replay exactly as they happened, with all the same emotions still attached.
ReplyDeleteI also liked how you circled it all back around to emotions and having to actually feel things. It's easy to just be and not necessarily enjoy or endure the ups and downs, but the way you explained it makes me realize how much of our lives are defined by how deeply we feel. Even the idea of making sure that we have something significant to recall in those last moments makes me consider how much of life we do take for granted. Great blog!
Hello Ananya, I wanted to share a possible hypothesis I have heard to explain the final minutes of consciousness. When you are in danger, your mind goes into a flight and fight response, while preparing your body it runs through memories in search of ideas about how to survive your problem. This happens in a similar amount of urgency when you are late for a class or being chased by a Tiger. This process normally takes about 1-2 seconds, unless you are dying. Your brain can feel when you are dying, it panics, does small searches and does not find anything. Finally, it starts to comb through every piece of information in the human mind, every memory of your life that you remember in the hopes of finding something that may help. Yet, as the oxygen runs out in your nerve cells, your brain finds nothing and in the last seven minutes of your life, you pass away as you watch the tales of the previous 40 million.
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