The Missing Experiment: Neural Identity at the Moment of Death A Testable Gap at the Intersection of Brain Fingerprinting, Dying Brain Research, and Consciousness Science

The neuroscience of dying has documented a striking phenomenon: structured electrical activity in the human brain persists, in some cases, beyond the clinical moment of death. Brain fingerprinting research has independently established that individual cognitive signatures measurable, stable, and person-specific patterns in cortical activity can reliably identify a person from their neural signal alone. These two research traditions have never been combined. No study has established an individual's neural signature before death and then asked whether that signature remains structurally present at and beyond the moment of clinical termination. This paper defines and motivates that missing experiment with precision. The central empirical question is: does the structured electrical activity documented at the dying brain belong, identifiably, to the person who was alive? This is not a philosophical question about survival or the soul. It is a measurement question, addressable with existing technology, and with pre-specified falsification criteria. We identify three research traditions that have independently developed the necessary instruments: (1) end-of-life EEG studies documenting post-mortem gamma activity and coherence surges (Xu et al., 2023; Vicente et al., 2022; Zinn et al., 2025); (2) neural fingerprinting research demonstrating that individual cortical signatures are stable, brief-segment-identifiable, and robust across conditions (Finn et al., 2015; Demuru & Fraschini, 2020; Sabbagh et al., 2021); and (3) Birbaumer et al.'s longitudinal research on Locked-In Syndrome, documenting preserved cognitive structure at extreme levels of physical substrate reduction. None of these traditions has followed its measurement to the boundary of clinical death while asking whose signal it is. The proposed experimental design proceeds in three phases: longitudinal establishment of an individual neural fingerprint in patients who have elected assisted dying; continuous passive EEG recording across the final hours and the clinical transition; and blinded post-hoc analysis testing whether the fingerprint structure is recoverable at each temporal interval around death. Two outcome regimes are falsifying: immediate structural collapse at clinical termination confirms the classical substrate-dependent model; persistent identifiable structure beyond clinical death constitutes an anomalous result requiring explanation within existing physical frameworks. The legal framework for this experiment exists in Switzerland, where the institutional environment for assisted dying research is most developed, though the specific research partnerships required would need to be established. The experiment requires no new instrumentation. It requires one methodological decision: to treat personal identity not merely neural activity as the variable of interest at the moment of death.