Awake at the Last

A Scientist Examines Terminal Lucidity

One of the many mysteries around death is the way people who have been lost for years to dementia or to a ravaging illness can suddenly become quite lucid shortly before dying. Alexander Batthyány, a psychology researcher at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, offers an example in his 2023 book, Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death, of a family who went to see a grandmother, apparently lost to de-mentia, faithfully every day. Then one day,

At first, we just didn’t trust our eyes and ears. But then my grandmother looked at us one by one (all five of us). Her large, beautiful eyes were perfectly clear. The haze of oblivion, of apathy, the “dead gaze” had given way to an expression of limpid vitality. Like bright water. I cannot think of a better image. She who hadn’t recognized us for a year, who hadn’t even reacted when we visited her, addressed every one of us by name.

As is so common in these situations, she died that night.

Research Begins

Batthyány first began to research this area because of a similar experience with his own grand-mother:

On the one hand, that whole episode was wonderful; on the other, it was heartrending, because I (in fact, I now believe both of us) sensed at the time that this gift of spending time together, if only on the phone, would be transient, and the conversation our last. It was.

But, as a careful scientist, he wanted to know more. When he started soliciting reports for study, he was surprised by the number he received, and he ended up directing an international study. Other scientists want to know more too. In 2009, the first peer-­reviewed articles on terminal lu-cidity, as it came to be called, began to appear in journals.

In his own research, Batthyány found that, while the episodes were brief (ten minutes to a couple of hours), 78 percent of patients showed “clear, coherent, and just about normal verbal communication.” But how? The approach of death should (and usually does) result in even more diminished capacities. How can years of dementia suddenly reverse themselves? No physiological explanation is available for the many cases on record.

The terminally lucid person can even be more lucid than usual, deepen-ing the mystery. Batthyány writes,

Further analysis of these reports shows a result I hadn’t initially anticipated: many indicat-ed that the patient was aware that he or she had been in a cognitively impaired state be-fore the lucid episode, and that a significant number of patients seemed to know that their lucid time window was not going to last. Some even spoke explicitly about their im-pending death and used the remaining time to bid farewell to their family, friends, and caregivers.

He is not trying to debunk or explain away terminal lucidity so much as understand more about its nature. That new nonmaterialist approach is beginning to make waves.

An Unlikely Convert

Sociologist Charles Murray is best known for his books, Losing Ground (1984), The Bell Curve (1994), and Coming Apart (2012), all of which are controversial—and definitely secular—books of social analysis. But in 2025, he wrote Taking Religion Seriously. There—on the way to becoming a Christian—he noted Batthyány’s work:

Many episodes of terminal lucidity occur for people who have not uttered a word or exhib-ited any recognition of family members for many months or even years, and yet the evi-dence of lucidity is often incontrovertible, demonstrating the patient’s possession of de-tailed memories, their ability to engage in logical conversation, and the return of person-ality characteristics. It is difficult to reconcile these facts with the materialist position that consciousness cannot exist independently of brain function.

When Murray aired the topic at the Wall Street Journal, he provoked an acid reply from famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker sees it all as wishful thinking:

When there is desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Mr. Mur-ray doesn’t report is documentation of any objective indicator of intelligence in these pa-tients, such as a neurological battery or a test of verifiable autobiographical details.¹

Batthyány was taken aback by Pinker’s gaslighting and the way he waved away masses of evidence. He responded:

Contrary to Mr. Pinker, grieving relatives aren’t the only ones reporting cases of terminal lucidity. In the international study I led, many instances were corroborated by physicians, nurses or hospice staff. Our findings are consistent with a 2024 scoping review compiling dozens of clinical reports, and with Sandy MacLeod’s 2009 prospective study. These stories aren’t sentimental hogwash; they are clinical observations from structured care environ-ments.

Mr. Pinker invokes brain complexity as a kind of explanatory wildcard. But complexity cuts both ways: The intricate coordination of neural circuits is exactly what widespread cor-tical and hippocampal atrophy destroys in advanced dementia. If these systems are irre-versibly degraded, we wouldn’t expect terminal lucidity to occur. Yet it does.²

The mystery remains. But it is clearly not a mystery that can be resolved by an application of 20th-century materialism. The decline of that approach to life can be seen now even in its boldest assertions.

Notes
1. Steven Pinker, “Charles Murray’s Unscientific Case for the Soul,” The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 2025).
2. Alexander Batthyány, “Setting the Terminal-Lucidity Record Straight,” The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 5, 2025).