It is interesting how the anecdotes of real people come to the surface in these interesting discussions. I take these as evidence especially when they mount up from all different types of people.
One of the claims I have heard is that the soul cannot continue after death because the brain contains the personality, and this starts to deteriorate often before and certainly after death. Evidence for this is things like brain damage from injury, or disease like Alzheimer’s, resulting in corresponding personality damage. This is of course extremely compelling evidence and I agree that in normal circumstances physical correspondence between brain and things associated with the `me` or soul, like memory and personality hold true. However as I said before when things become extreme glimpses of another paradigm start to show.
One example is a phenomenon where someone near their time to die, regardless of brain degeneration, becomes lucid with full personality and memory.
Two of my friends have told me of similar things happening to their loved ones as they lay in bed near the end. This if true is a spoke in the eye yet again, to a materialist view of the soul being the whole deal. There is no reason to think that animals would be any different to us, and if so it means there is evidence to support the idea that memories and personality are interconnected with something else and are only temporarily associated with brain function. That is until events become extreme as with death.
Here is a link to a study called Terminal lucidity: A review and a case collection:
http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/emily-kelly-pdfs/OTH25terminal%20lucidity-AGG.pdf
Here is some of it here:
“The unexpected return of mental clarity and memory shortly before death is a curious phenomenon that has so far not received much attention from psychiatrists or other physicians. We refer to such cases as “terminal lucidity.” The most remarkable cases involve patients who were mentally ill but seemed to recover shortly before death. Despite their potential to trigger the development of new forms of therapies and to contribute to an enhanced understanding of cognition and memory processing, terminal lucidity in mental disorders was largely ignored by psychiatrists and other physicians during the 20th century. In this article, we present results of a literature survey regarding terminal lucidity in mental disorders.. . .
After the mid-19th century, academic interest in terminal lucidity decreased. Accounts of terminal lucidity were published most often by authors interested in the philosophy of mind and brain, not necessarily physicians. Because these terminal lucidity reports mirrored the cases described earlier by physicians, we assume that they generally constitute reliable case reports.
It was not until 1975 that another detailed article on terminal lucidity was published in a medical journal, this one concerning 3 cases of chronic schizophrenia (Turetskaia and Romanenko, 1975). That article is the only publication on terminal lucidity in mental disorders we could find in medical journals during the 20th century.
Within the last few years, interest in terminal lucidity in mental disorders has increased again, as indicated in the publication of cases by Brayne et al. (2008) and by Grosso (2004), and the brief review of terminal lucidity in mentally disorders included in Kelly et al. (2007). Most of these recent cases involved terminally ill patients who suffered from severe dementia. In one study of end-of-life experiences, 70% of caregivers in a nursing home reported that during the past 5 years, they had observed patients with dementia becoming lucid a few days before death (Brayne et al., 2008). Members of another palliative care team confirmed that such incidents happen regularly, and one interviewee also reported that her own mother had dementia and could not recognize her family until her last day (Brayne et al., 2008). Similarly, a woman aged 92 who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease for 9 years and did not recognize close family members, including her son, recognized them again 24 hours before she died. Moreover, she knew how old she was and where she was, which she had not known for many years (Grosso, 2004).
Temporal Aspects of Terminal Lucidity
As far back as the early 19th century, Burdach (1826) noted that there are 2 ways in which terminal lucidity may manifest. First, the severity of mental derangement can improve slowly in conjunction with the decline of bodily vitality. The cases of schizophrenia reported by Turetskaia and Romanenko (1975) fall into this category. Second, full mental clarity can appear quite abruptly and unexpectedly shortly before death. Many of the cases involving dementia can be filed in this second category.
Table 2 shows the onset of terminal lucidity as described in the 49 case reports we were able to trace, separated into 4 clusters according to their timing. In 84% of the cases, terminal lucidity seems to occur within the last week before death, with 43% occurring within the last day of life.
. . .
From a medical perspective, terminal lucidity in patients suffering from schizophrenia and dementia is of primordial importance due to its potential to improve the mental conditions of chronic patients by a deeper understanding of the psychopathology and neuropathology involved. Yet, it is rarely if ever mentioned in scholarly books on schizophrenia or dementia and their treatment. . . .
The same applies for patients suffering from the various forms of advanced dementia. Here, it is additionally intriguing that several forms of dementia, notably Alzheimer’s disease, are largely caused by degeneration and irreversible degradation of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus, resulting among other symptoms in confusion, disorientation, and memory loss (Wenk, 2003). It is unclear how severely demented patients can sometimes recognize their family members and remember their lives again shortly before death, suggesting that the memories in these cases had been rendered inaccessible but not entirely deleted.
We have limited our literature review to cases of terminal lucidity in mental illness that were not satisfactorily explained in medical terms. Most often, a medical explanation was not even attempted. However, some authors suggested that high fever prior to dying might induce terminal lucidity (Freidreich, 1839), a mechanism that was at one time used in a treatment for one specific mental illness.”
