Terminal Lucidity: The Emerging Science Of «Seeing The Light» Just Before Death

Things were not going very well for Aleksandr Pushkin in the fall of 1836. He was deep in debt, expenses piling up and rumors were circulating about the private life of his wife, Natalia. Everything kept escalating until January when he faced Georges d’Anthès, one of the main causes of all his problems, in a pistol duel. It is one of those key episodes in the imagery of Romanticism. Pushkin was shot and the wound became infected, leading to his death from septicemia.

But in those days between being shot and dying, the poet regained consciousness amid his delirium. It was «one of those sudden improvements that are so illusory in mortal illnesses», his doctor wrote at the time.

Alexander Batthyány now retrieves the words of Pushkin’s doctor to talk about a phenomenon that is very old, but which science had not confronted until recently: terminal lucidity.

«Both clinical research and the testimonies of those who care for the elderly and dying agree: they tell us that the last days of life are often marked by a deep understanding, spent tying up loose ends and discovering or fulfilling the meaning of one’s life until the very last breath», he writes.

Batthyány is the director of the Victor Frankl Institute in Vienna and the Institute for Psychological Research at Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, as well as one of the scientists who has worked extensively in this area. He discusses this in El Umbral (The Threshold), which was recently published by Errata Naturae.

Terminal lucidity is precisely what Pushkin’s doctor pointed out, what a significant portion of healthcare personnel see in their daily work, and what was part of collective knowledge when death was something that was dealt with in the home: there is a moment when people, no matter how ill they are or how much they have lost consciousness, seem to come to their senses and regain their vitality and control over themselves.

It is at that moment that a grandmother with dementia or a grandfather who has been unconscious for some time due to a terminal illness speaks coherently, identifies the whole family, and remembers their life experiences perfectly. They may even give instructions about what should happen after their death.

It is, however, just an illusion. This miraculous recovery is short-lived and precedes death. People usually die not long after.

Near death

There is no concrete data on how many people experience this and how many episodes of terminal lucidity are recorded each day. Batthyány cites statistics compiled in a British study by psychiatrist Peter Fenwinck, which indicates that 7 out of 10 caregivers acknowledge having seen it in their patients. Researcher Sandy Macleod tracked 100 consecutive deaths in a New Zealand hospital and encountered terminal lucidity on six occasions, which would account for a 6% occurrence among the dying.

Medical staff acknowledged to me that this was a common occurrence

Since Batthyány has made understanding terminal lucidity his life’s work, he and his team collect testimonials. This gives them access to many stories about these experiences, although it is also true that it limits their research to a certain extent (after all, most of the people who write to them are those who have experienced it with their loved ones, which skews the results).

What he does achieve by listening to them is to confirm that their experiences are valid, something that has not always been the case until now. This happened before with so-called near-death experiences (those moments that popular culture seizes on when they say that someone has «seen the light»), another of those scientific mysteries linked to death. The expert points out that when they began to study it, they discovered that between 8 and 18% of people who have been resuscitated experience it.

«I am telling you these two stories so that you know that you are dealing with something very real. On both occasions, the medical staff acknowledged to me that this was a common occurrence.They referred to it as ‘deathbed lucidity’», writes a person who experienced episodes of terminal lucidity with both their father and mother.

Implications for consciousness and cognitive disease

Researching terminal lucidity is not a paranormal matter, nor is it magical. «The coverage was more sensationalist than I would have liked», laments Batthyány about how the media reported on his first presentation of results. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that it does not happen to everyone (in fact, the expert has already documented the frustration of people who hope it will happen to their loved ones, to no avail), and also that what is most interesting is what it tells us about how the human brain works and what the limits or ramifications of consciousness are.

Scientific progress has made everything very practical and eclipsed the idea of the soul

Batthyány recalls that «we still know very little about our conscious self», and that our knowledge of the brain has changed a lot in the last two centuries, along with our understanding of life and death. Scientific progress has made everything very practical and eclipsed the idea of the soul, the scientist argues, something that research into terminal lucidity brings back.

Patients who experience these episodes recover no neurons and there is no substantial physical change in their brains, even though they ‘return’. So what is actually happening?

All of this also makes the study of terminal lucidity a tricky area, because it «appeals to religious and spiritual intuitions and hopes» and may veer more toward beliefs than scientific questions.

Perhaps most relevant is that episodes of terminal lucidity may contribute to research into diseases that cause cognitive impairment. Half of the patients who have experienced these episodes and who Batthyány and his team are talking about were people with dementia, a very common disease that is still not fully understood. Indeed, it is a disease in which control of consciousness is completely lost.

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This content is part of a collaboration agreement of ‘WorldCrunch’, with the magazine ‘Ethic’. Read the original at this link.