Terminal lucidity: Taylor excerpt #11

Greg Taylor writes: One other strange phenomenon witnessed near the time of death is what is variously referred to as ‘terminal lucidity’, ‘lightening up before death’, or ‘premortem surge’. In these cases, those who care for people suffering from dementia or other severe ailments report that their patients spontaneously and unexpectedly (given their diagnosis and disease severity) “speak or behave in ways that appear to suggest lucid awareness of their environment, including return of memory and verbal function,” in the hours or days before their passing. This ‘return to lucidity’ often allows dying patients to say goodbye to family members. Cases such as these are hard to explain in terms of mainstream brain science, given they occur in situations where the medical diagnosis makes the possibility of spontaneous remission unlikely, as damage to the brain suffered by these patients “is considered to be irreversible.”

 

In a British survey of caregivers, approximately 70% stated they had witnessed terminal lucidity in the preceding past five years in dying patients. Similarly, in an Irish study, “one of the most frequent experiences” reported by palliative carers (57.5% of respondents) was ‘Patients in a deep coma becoming suddenly alert enough to say goodbye to relatives’.  

 

Dr. Michael Nahm noted that such cases have been reported throughout history, with classical scholars such as Hippocrates, Plutarch and Cicero all recording its occurrence; and with a research team he collected 83 case reports of terminal lucidity.

In a prospective study carried out in New Zealand, 100 consecutive deaths in a hospice were observed. In six of those deaths, unexpected spontaneous return of cognitive functions and verbal ability occurred in the 48 hours before the death of the patient. A more recent study, focusing exclusively on 124 cases of dementia-related (i.e. those in which medical science says there can be no spontaneous cognitive improvement) paradoxical lucidity found that in around 80% of the cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers, with the majority of patients dying within a day of the episode:

[P]atients were rated as “clear, coherent, and just about normal verbal communication” during the lucid episode. In terms of the duration of the lucid episode, the median value was between 30 and 60 min... In 123 of the 124 reports (one report didn’t list this data), the median survival after the lucid episode was between 2 and 24 hr.

The researchers in this study also pointed out possible parallels between terminal lucidity and the NDE, as both often feature “unexpected cognitive arousal” in the face of compromised brain function, remembering that in the majority of NDEs mental functioning was reported to either be as good as usual, or even markedly improved.

What are we to make of all this – death-bed visions and Peak in Darien accounts, experiences of family and carers at the bedside (sometimes involving multiple witnesses), death-bed coincidences and crisis apparitions, and terminal lucidity? At some point when digging into the huge volume of cases of these types, we feel as if we’re desperately reaching for mundane explanations to satisfy the current scientific paradigm, rather than simply following the evidence to the obvious conclusion: that all these witnesses are observing what happens during the transition from this world to the next.

Comparing eyewitness testimony regarding extraordinary phenomena at the death-bed to the testimony of witnesses to meteor falls prior to the 18th century – including many incidents in which multiple people saw the same thing – it feels we are repeating the same situation all over again: a fight to integrate anomalous evidence into an incomplete system of knowledge, rather than simply updating that system based on the evidence.

To quote Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, diligent researchers of ELEs:

To keep on citing ‘coincidence’ for all the very convincing accounts we have been given, becomes first a weak and then a frankly implausible explanation... [T]he hypothesis of extended mind manifesting at the time of death is a much more persuasive explanation for most of these experiences than coincidence or expectation.

 
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.