When the Dying Wake: What Terminal Lucidity Tells Us
Strange bursts of clarity at life’s end challenge the reach of neuroscience.
Updated November 12, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
The political scientist Charles Murray, best known for The Bell Curve and other fiercely debated works on human intelligence , has taken up a more metaphysical interest: the existence of the soul. In a Wall Street Journal essay , Murray declares that materialism —the idea that the mind is nothing but brain processes—is collapsing under the weight of new scientific evidence. His chief example is the phenomenon of terminal lucidity: startling episodes in which people suffering from severe dementia or brain damage suddenly regain coherent consciousness, memory , and personality , just before death.
As a philosopher who specializes in the mind–body problem, I agree that materialism is less plausible than many suppose, and that its traditional rival, mind-body dualism , should be taken seriously. So, I welcome Murray’s willingness to reopen the question. But I do not find the evidence he gives persuasive.
Terminal Lucidity vs. Materialism
Terminal lucidity is a fascinating and understudied topic. A woman suffering from Alzheimer's has not talked or responded to family members for several years. One day, out of the blue, she starts talking coherently: She recognizes her granddaughter, asks about her family, offers advice. Shortly afterwards, she dies.
Many such cases have been reported. The spell of lucidity tends to be brief, and the patient usually dies within a week, often on the same day. The phenomenon is real, even if there has been little scientific research into it.
How does this challenge materialism? Murray’s contention is that if materialism is true, then there must be some neurological explanation for terminal lucidity, and that no such explanation can be given. He writes:
A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.
Murray proposes another explanation: Terminal lucidity is evidence of the human soul. Can this be true?
The Brain Is a Mystery
Here is the first problem with Murray’s view. We have a very thorough understanding of how the heart operates and why, without its pumping, the circulation of blood would be very hard to explain. By contrast, we have only a very limited understanding of how the brain operates.
It is true that neuroscientists have built a body of knowledge about the brain that is, in one sense, very large. It would take many lifetimes to master it in detail. However, that enormous body of knowledge only represents a minuscule fraction of how much there is to learn. The brain is, to repeat a platitude, very complex, and we can know a lot about it even while remaining ignorant of a great deal more.
Murray appears to overestimate how far neuroscience has advanced. He states that “the brain has been mapped for years.” In fact, scientists have only lately produced a detailed map of a fruit fly's brain. We are a very long way from doing the same for humans. (The fruit fly brain contains 140,000 neurons; the human brain has 86 billion. The difference in number between the neurons in a fruit fly brain and a human’s is therefore approximately 86 billion.)
Our limited understanding of the brain is a problem for anyone who wants to use neuroscience to argue in favor of materialism. But it also undercuts Murray's case against materialism. If "some so-far-unknown capability of the brain" is needed to explain terminal lucidity, then such a capability may well be there just waiting to be discovered.
Can Neuroscience Explain Terminal Lucidity?
The other problem with Murray's reasoning is that it is not true that neuroscience lacks the resources for a plausible explanation of terminal lucidity.
Murray’s claim that terminal lucidity refutes materialism rests on a questionable presupposition. It assumes that, on a materialist explanation, dementia and brain damage must operate by permanently destroying the neural structures responsible for memory, personality, and coherent thought.
If that were the only materialist perspective available, then the return of lucidity would indeed seem to suggest some immaterial factor. But it is plausible that dementia involves not the annihilation of the relevant neural structures but their disruption. The circuits underlying clear thought and memory may still exist but be kept from their normal function.
The problem might lie in depleted neurotransmitters—the chemicals that carry signals from one neuron to another—or dulled sensitivity of neurons to those chemicals, or the pathological overactivity of inhibitory neurons that dampen communication across relevant regions of the brain. Such conditions would suppress lucidity without erasing its physical basis.
On that picture, the striking clarity that sometimes appears near death need not be supernatural . It may arise from the dying process itself: A shift in neurochemistry, the exhaustion of overactive inhibitory cells, or a surge of electrical activity may cause long-dormant circuits of memory and personality to spark back to life, offering a final glimpse of the person as they once were.
We already know that even severely damaged brains can regain function under certain conditions. Similar “paradoxical lucidity” has been observed in patients with severe brain injury after the administration of drugs such as zolpidem. There is nothing implausible about the idea that the drastic changes that occur at the point of death could have a similar effect.
None of this should be read as dismissing the mystery of terminal lucidity, or the comfort that it often brings. The dying mind is among the least understood phenomena in nature. Whatever the explanation, the chance to exchange a final goodbye is a rare and moving gift.
It may be that terminal lucidity will eventually prove beyond neuroscientific explanation. For my part, I think that scientists have been much too quick to dismiss the possibility that consciousness might involve some nonphysical aspect of reality. But terminal lucidity does not establish that conclusion.
For now, I am unpersuaded that terminal lucidity is the evidence that overturns materialism. It is, rather, a reminder of how mysterious the brain is, and of how cautious we should be when looking for metaphysical answers in scientific data.
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Ralph Stefan Weir, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln, Senior Research Associate of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham and Research Associate at the University of Oxford.
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