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Doctors Find A Patient's Brain Working For 10 Minutes After Death

Doctors Find A Patient's Brain Working For 10 Minutes After Death

This is creepy!

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie

Doctors are still trying to work out what happens when we die - and now they've been thrown a bit of a curve ball.

A team from Canada were shocked to find a brain continue to operate like it was in sleep mode for 10 minutes after the heart stopped beating.

They were monitoring four people's brain waves as life-sustaining therapy was removed and three people died naturally.

But in the fourth patient - the brain showed continual brain activity.

The researchers said, "In one patient, single delta wave bursts persisted following the cessation of both the cardiac rhythm and arterial blood pressure (ABP)."

via GIPHY

Now before you start screaming zombie - the paper published in the National Centre for Biotechnology Information says all the four patients had different brain activity, so it's hard to pinpoint what these extra electrical spikes mean.

But the researchers did point out that it raises some interesting questions about whether or not you can start harvesting organs from a person with a brain still technically working.

In a different study back in 2013 - a team of researchers found rats had a burst of brain activity one minute after their heads were decapitated.

Yep. A dead rat's chopped off head was still working more than a minute after being lopped.

Apparently the study found the electrical impulses were eight times stronger than when the rats were fully conscious.

via GIPHY

The team looking into the phenomenon are wondering whether these two types of extra brain activity are similar to the ones that happen in near death experiences.

You know, the one where you see your life flash before your eyes or you have a massive outer body experience and you detach from your body.

That kind of thing.

Zombies could wipe out humanity in six months

Here at the LADbible we don't like to over exaggerate things but if these two studies do in fact show the first signs of zombie behaviour then it's not good news.

Students at Leicester University were tasked with calculating the exact amount of time it would take for a zombie virus to infect every individual on Earth. To do this they developed a mathematical model for disease that predicts how an infection will spread through a population over time.

The formula they developed calculates that 100 days into a zombie outbreak, just over 100 survivors would be left uninfected, and that within six months, these stragglers would also die or become zombies themselves.

via GIPHY

Because the researchers were unable to take the fact humans can fight back into account, they have admitted that their projections are less than perfect.

Concluding their study, they admitted: "Natural birth and death rates have been neglected since the epidemic takes place over 100 days, so the natural births and deaths are negligible compared to the impact of the zombie virus over the short time frame.

"We also assumed that a zombie will turn one person into a zombie each day with a 90 percent probability, meaning that each zombie is able to find a person every day. As the zombie to human ratio increases, this becomes less realistic. A more developed model might vary.

"We have also not included the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies, which may give the humans a better chance at survival."

So while this research might have sounded worrying at first, looks like you might still be alright as long as you have a baseball bat at home, or better still a shotgun, unless you believe the noise will attract them. Let's hope we never have to find out.

Featured Image Credit: PA