Terminal Lucidity

A fascinating article at Mind Matters addresses a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity. It happens that a small number of patients with dementia or some other cognitive impairment, patients who have lived, sometimes for years, in a mental fog will suddenly become lucid for minutes, hours or even days before their deaths.

One well-known case was that of Anna Katharina Ehmer (1895–1922) who, due to mental disabilities, lived in a psychiatric institution in Germany for most of her life.

… [She had] allegedly never spoken a single word during her life. Yet, she was reported to have sung dying songs for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head of this institution and by its chief physician....

In a 2018 article, Zaron Burnett III recounts that no one was expecting that: “The doctors and hospital staff who witnessed Anna’s concertina for death were rendered speechless themselves; some sobbed in bewilderment; others felt they’d witnessed a miracle of the soul.”

The Mind Matters article goes on to note studies that have found that,

....out of the 227 dementia patients tracked, approximately 10 percent exhibited terminal lucidity. From his literature review, Nahm has reported that approximately 84 percent of people who experience terminal lucidity will die within a week, with 42 percent dying the same day.

Another case involved a 91-year-old woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for 15 years:

The woman had long been unresponsive and showed no signs of recognizing her daughter or anyone for the previous five years. One evening, she started a normal conversation with her daughter. She talked about her fear of death, difficulties she had with the church and family members, and then died a few hours later.

There's much more on this phenomenon at the link, but here are four interesting points the article makes:

• Terminal lucidity occurs for atheists and believers at the same rate.
• Terminally lucid persons tend to focus on “reminiscing, preparations, last wishes, body concerns, such as hunger or thirst, as well as an awareness of their impending death.”
• Sometimes, that last burst of lucidity is a disappointment for friends and family who sometimes believe that a miracle of healing has occurred when in fact death soon follows.
• There's no known physical or medical explanation for the phenomenon.

Evidently, there's no change in the physical health of the brain when a person experiences this flash of awareness and cognitive ability. Does this suggest that the physical, material brain isn't the complete explanation for our cognition?

Might we also have an immaterial mind that works in tandem with the brain but at physical death is able to disconnect itself from it?

As research on terminal lucidity and related phenomena like post- or near-death out-of-the-body experiences continues to mount perhaps the evidence for the existence of an immaterial mind will continue to grow as well.

If it does then the conviction that our physical death is not the end of our existence will certainly be reinforced.