Looking for lightness of being (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

AS THE light at the end of the tunnel approaches, the need to belong to a group and be near loved ones may be among your final thoughts.

So say Markus Quirin and his colleagues at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. The team prompted thoughts of death in 17 young men with an average age of 23 by asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements such as “I am afraid of dying a painful death”. At the same time, the men’s brain activity was monitored using a functional MRI scanner.

To compare the brain activity associated with thoughts of death with that coupled to another unpleasant experience, the team also prompted thoughts of dental pain using statements like “I panic when I am sitting in the dentist’s waiting room”. Although the threat of dental pain is unpleasant, “it’s not a threat of death”, Quirin says.


Quirin’s team found that thoughts of death, but not of dental pain, triggered heightened activity in brain regions such as the right amygdala, which is associated with fear and anxiety. More surprisingly, the team also saw increased activity in the caudate nucleus when the men thought of death – an area of the brain associated with performing habitual behaviours (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq106).

Quirin thinks the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger could explain the unexpected result. Heidegger said that doing what everyone else does is a defence against anxiety. According to Quirin, performing culturally learned habitual behaviours to fit in with the crowd could be a strategy to reduce the anxiety associated with death.

Intriguingly, activity in the caudate nucleus is also associated with feeling in love. The solace found when thinking about a loved one could also alleviate the stress associated with being close to death, says Mario Mikulincer at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, who was not involved with the study. “This neural finding fits with our behavioural findings that thoughts of mortality activate the attachment system, motivating us to seek love and protection from significant others,” he says.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, disagrees. “The brain seems to be a mix-and-match system, in which regions are activated in endlessly different combinations to create different nuances of emotion,” she says. “Thoughts of death, like thoughts of romantic passion, are strong and profound. One would expect at least some of the same activation patterns.”

Quirin’s team now hopes to investigate brain activity in older people to find out whether the same thoughts occur to a person nearing the end of their life.