No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State
Frontiers in Psychology January 28, 2021 Dylan Thomas Lott, Tenzin Yeshi, N. Norchung et al. 18 citations
Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans, reinforcing the need for further investigation of brain activity during the dying process. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state (tukdam) cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For healthy baseline and postmortem subjects, resting state EEG, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response data were collected. Living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, but no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases.