do all zombie stories go to heaven?

What happens when we die?

Fortunately, News.com.au knows. Just read its February 7 article titled “First-ever brain recording of dying human reveals what happens as we die”.1

It discusses a patient case study (sample size = 1 person), in which an 87-year-old person died on the operating table, while hooked up to an EEG, a device that measures brain waves. The study suggests that the readings on this device could show the patient was recalling memories from their life as they died.

Cool!

I’d heard something about this idea sometime in the past, but I couldn’t quite pin down what or when. Then a Magical Fox delivered this TikTok to me from “stargirlzazazoom”. It’s a couple of days old, has more than 670,000 views and some 70,000 likes and 1,400 odd comments. It pointed to the News.com.au report from Feb. 7.

I wanted to dig in. That’s a big claim and if you see big claims, you should want to know if they hold up. Very quickly, I realised this one does not hold up — revealing problems with these zombie stories that, every now and again, seem to be reanimated and zip around the web, rotting the brains of anyone who comes into contact with them.

Okay, the News.com.au story.

It’s published in February of this, The Year of Humanity’s Collapse, 2025. It says, in the second paragraph no less, that this is “new research”.

This is the first problem. This is very much not new research. It comes from a study in February 2022. Why on Earth would News.com.au be reporting on this now, three years later and claiming it’s “new research”? That makes very little sense.

It seems the Daily Mail posted about this on February 5, two days before news.com.au picked it up.

However, this is good for us, trying to make sense of a claim. It’s been out in the world for three years — if it doesn’t hold up, other scientists have likely had time to look at it and think about it, right? Maybe other studies have shown similar things.

Fortunately, you don’t even have to look far… Attached to the original paper is a commentary piece by highly-regarded researchers in the field of Near Death Experiences.2 This commentary (not a study itself) raises important questions about the validity of the findings, which any piece written on the study three years later should discuss. News.com.au fails to do so.

Another problem lies in some of the quotes in the piece. For one, it’s unclear where the “groundbreaking”3 quote comes from and, weirdly, the story also takes a quote that the last author of the study, Ajmal Zemmar, provided in a press release… and removes the quotation marks.

Zemmar made this remark in his university’s press release:

“These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation”

News.com.au had it written down like this:

These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.’

No, that’s not a stray apostrophe at the end there... That appears in the News.com.au text.

Which is interesting — because the Daily Mail piece that came two days earlier uses individual quotation marks. Now, I can only speculate here, but is this a copy-paste job from Daily Mail gone wrong? If it was copied from the press release (a common feature of science reporting) then why wouldn’t it have the double quotation mark. Hmmm!

Other segments of the piece reveal potential copy-pasting, such as this sentence, identical in both but for the first word:

However, the neuroscientists captured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death, allowing them to see what happened in the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped beating.

I contacted the journalist behind this piece at News.com.au, Rebekah Scanlan. She is listed as the publication’s Lifestyle Editor. She did not respond to three questions I asked about the piece.

There’s definitely interesting questions raised by this scientific paper, but the reporting on it does a disservice to readers by presenting an emotional story, rather than one that reflects the scientific literature. And, it’s hard to know where it came from or why it rose from the dead, three years later.

Why does it matter?

Zombie science stories are becoming pretty common, with virality achieved in the past able to be seized upon a second, third or fourth time.

This story started with an interesting press release — one that should have been poked and prodded and commented on by experts — but three years later, the zombie story reared its head again still lacking any nuance or uncertainty. Whether this came through Reddit or TikTok to the Daily Mail and then onto News.com.au is hard to know. But it shows that once viral stories can remain viral, hardening around a mistruth or misconception, even when evidence to the contrary has been presented.

We should put a science journalist in every newsroom. Short of that, general or non-specialist journalists should be turning to places like the Australian Science Media Centre and the Science Journalists Association of Australia4 for assistance when thinking about writing science stories. It’s more important than ever, as we’ve seen science under attack, and further erosion of trust in science can be inspired by this type of reporting. So, carn.

See you next time.

Post-script:

Weirdly, it seems that the success of the TikTok inspired the TikToker to make their own Substack, just a few days ago, and the first post is about this study.

I am not going to link it, although it is actually more balanced than both the TikTok and the News.com.au article. The problem is, when I ran the piece through a bunch of different AI checkers, 3/5 flagged it as possibly AI-generated. It certainly uses a lot of em-dashes, though this isn’t a sign of AI-generation necessarily. And it does5