No Brain Parts For Seeing and Hearing? No Afterlife!

Image credits belong to: geralt | Pixabay

What biology and anatomy do you have in the afterlife that allows you to see what is happening around you?  

How do your senses tell you it is paradisiacal or punitive? How do you feel whether it is painful or blissful? How do you know there are green pastures and warm sunlight? How do you feel yourself sitting in solitude as the cold winds whip against you? Whatever state you are in, what anatomical parts do you have to perceive the environmental stimuli? 

First of all...

You need an occipital lobe (found at the back of the skull) to process what you see. You need a temporal lobe (found in between the ears) to hear things and use language. How can anything be seen or heard in the afterlife if those earthly, anatomical parts are lost at death?

Damage to the occipital lobe can cause you to go blind or have blind spots. In other cases, such as an occipital stroke, someone can have blurry vision or hallucinations. So, could it be possible that we hallucinate everything in the afterlife? But how can we even hallucinate if our occipital lobe is completely eradicated? 

Something else to consider: 

If the afterlife has an elemental nature that is completely different from ours, it is hard to imagine that any kind of visual processor, such as an occipital lobe, or an auditory processor, such as a temporal lobe, would be able to survive and process without continuous oxygen. The human brain needs oxygen to access and use glucose as its vital source of energy. 

Consciousness can cease within 15 seconds after being cut off from the oxygen supply and brain damage can follow 4 minutes later. You may have heard of cerebral anoxia which is when oxygen supply completely ceases, whereas cerebral hypoxia is partial loss of oxygen supply. This tends to happen with people who have suffered cardiac or respiratory arrest, dysfunctional heart rhythms, low blood pressure from hemorrhaging, suffocation, choking, strangulation, near drowning, drug overdose, and others.  

Dr. Osman Shabir, who is from the University of Sheffield, wrote an article in News Medical Life Sciences about what happens when our brains finally succumb to the inevitable. In 2017, researchers studied 4 patients who would soon be removed from life-support. An electroencephalogram (EEG) test was done, attaching metal discs (electrodes) to their scalps to measure their brain’s electrical activity. One patient had brain waves that were similar to what is seen in deep sleep. This happened 10 minutes after clinical death, which is when the pulse and pupils cease their functions. Researchers were unable to explain this. 

I quote Dr. Shabir: 

“Typically, brain activity begins to fade a few minutes before death, and this was evident in three of the four patients. But for one of the four patients, persistent electrical activity could be seen and was not attributable to any technical malfunction. This was also independent of the slow ‘wave of death’ seen in rats after decapitation, or some patients leading to the moment of death. What was causing this is still unknown, but provides an insight into perception of the world even after death. Did this patient have awareness during this time, and is it possible that they had awareness after being pronounced dead? All four patients experienced unique EEG signatures in the frontal cortex before and after death suggesting death could be a unique experience for each person.” 

What an inexplicable finding, indeed! What a great unique experience to ponder. Still, uniqueness and inexplicability are not evidence. Uniqueness and inexplicability merely perpetuate the fact that death is still a mystery and we would be wise to withhold our conclusions.