It’s a fascinating topic to me. I got introduced to this fact as an argument for an afterlife, but I’m more interested in the biological aspect. What happens in the brain?
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Your body doesn’t have an off-switch. It’s a system of many parts, and they don’t all stop functioning at once. Depending on the cause of death, circulation to the brain may be cut off, and that will eventually cause the brain cells to die, but not immediately. The cells have some oxygen and energy left to burn, but when they run out, it’s game over.
So it all depends on how you define “death”, which is not as straightforward as you might think. Even if you make it synonymous with brain death, the brain doesn’t necessarily die all at once. You could suffer damage to the cortex that leaves you unconscious and unable to interact with your environment, but with an intact brainstem that keeps your body’s vital functions going.
In any case, if you define death as the brain ceasing to function (irreversibly), then the brain by definition does not continue to function after death. If you define death as the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions (e.g. if your heart has permanently stopped beating), then obviously that leaves some leeway for the brain to stay alive, though not for long if it isn’t supplied with oxygen some other way.
There’s no mystery here and it’s not an argument for an afterlife. The brain still stops functioning, even if brain death comes some time after the death of other body parts. If you think that brain functioning is necessary for an afterlife, you’re obviously out of luck. If you think that a short period of brain functioning after your other organs have died allows some kind of “transition” to an afterlife, then I put it to you that this transition could also start to happen before the rest of your body starts to die (if such wondrous things are possible, getting the timing right seems trivial in comparison), so the case for such a transition isn’t strengthened by the observation that the brain sometimes keeps functioning after (say) the heart has stopped beating – just as it isn’t weakened by the observation that this doesn’t always happen. The brain may sometimes be the first part of a person to die, e.g. if they suffer a fatal stroke or get shot in the head, so then this period does not occur.
In other words, if you want to believe in an afterlife, that’s your prerogative, but you can’t use this period of residual brain function as evidence one way or another.
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