I remember holding my grandpa’s hand as he peacefully passed away while surrounded by loved ones a few years back. At that moment, I swore I could feel his soul drift up into the room around us as his body suddenly felt like stone.

When I met eyes with my mom, I knew she could sense it, too. It was the most reassuring feeling—believing our loved ones’ souls live on, if not in physical form.

Now, there might actually be evidence that this is exactly what happens when someone passes on.

Researchers Might Have Found Evidence That Our Souls Leave Our Bodies After Death

In an interview with Project Unity, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and professor of anesthesiology and psychology, quoted a recent study that monitored the brain activity of a clinically dead patient. Despite the patient having virtually no other signs of life, the electroencephalogram (EEG) found a spike of energy in the brain, which experts believe could have been the “soul leaving the body.”

“They saw everything go away and then … you got this activity when there was no blood pressure, no heart rate,” Hameroff told Project Unity in an interview Tuesday. “So that could be the near-death experience, or it could be the soul leaving the body, perhaps.”

Exploring this idea, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asked, “Is it possible for the human brain to be activated by the dying process?”

“We addressed this issue by analyzing the electroencephalograms (EEG) of four dying patients before and after the clinical withdrawal of their ventilatory support and found that the resultant global hypoxia markedly stimulated gamma activities in two of the patients,” the study authors wrote. “The surge of gamma connectivity was both local, within the temporo–parieto–occipital (TPO) junctions, and global between the TPO zones and the contralateral prefrontal areas.”

Gamma activity, which is high frequency, is typically associated with working memory, attention, information processing, and sensory perception, among other cognitive functions.

“While the mechanisms and physiological significance of these findings remain to be fully explored, these data demonstrate that the dying brain can still be active,” the study authors continued.

Some experts believe this is merely life passing before our eyes before death, while others—like Dr. Hameroff—think it could be evidence of our souls leaving our bodies. No matter the case, the surge in consciousness just post-death is something to be explored.