Sometimes you get interesting data by accident. You weren’t trying to do research; you were trying to do something else entirely. But the data fall into your lap, so to speak. Do you throw the data away, or share what you’ve found?

This particular incident has taken five years to surface. In 2016, an elderly Canadian was hospitalized with seizures. He was given medication and then the doctors conducted tests to determine the cause of the seizures.

An EEG turned out to be the final test.(2) As the team measured brain waves, the patient underwent a series of seizures, then cardiac arrest, and then death. (The patient had a Do Not Resuscitate order in force.) The EEG collected 15 minutes of data spanning these events.

What did the EEG detect?

• The brain functions for 30 seconds after the heart stops.
• There was a pause in brain activity just after the…