Terminal lucidity

You may already know that dying people who are comatose or delirious sometimes regain full lucidity in the last minutes, hours, or days before their death.  But, usually, the people being described were in the normal range mentally before their final illness.

What is even more amazing is when people who have been severely, chronically mentally ill, with dementia, or otherwise mentally disabled for many years become rational and lucid in their final moments.  This seems particularly remarkable in a brain whose architecture must have become pretty committed to a longtime dysfunction.

I don’t see how a neurological substrate for a clinical presentation of many years’ duration could change on a dime.  Especially when we’re talking about neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s where parts of the brain are simply destroyed.  It’s easier to imagine that the individual’s field of consciousness – intact and residing outside the brain -- becomes suddenly, temporarily more accessible.

This might be analogous to the proverbial mother who lifts a car off her child – without having developed the necessary muscles first.  It’s also reminiscent of people blind from birth who report having vision in their NDEs.

I try to understand the connection between the brain as transceiver and the development of psychic capacities.  But, it may also be the case that, under certain conditions, we can access our expanded capacities without having developed our "hardware."

If we can have consciousness without brain, then what is the point of going through neurological damage and subsequent remodeling both to regain functions and potentially add expanded capacities?  There must be some evolutionary advantage (see 4 Dec 11 post), a tertium non datur that is created by interaction between the spiritual and the physical.  Something brand new. 

Sources (thanks to Gerd Hövelmann):

Nahm, M. & Greyson, B.  (2009).  Terminal lucidity in patients with chronic schizophrenia and dementia: A survey of the literature.  Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 197, 942-944.

Nahm, M.  (2009).  Terminal lucidity in people with mental illness and other mental disability: An overview and implications for possible explanatory models.  Journal of Near-Death Studies, 28, 87-106.