In the 1780s, in a laboratory in Bologna, a man named Luigi Galvani was dissecting a dead frog when his assistant’s metal scalpel touched an exposed nerve at the same moment a spark jumped from a nearby electrical machine. The dead frog’s leg kicked. Galvani froze. The animal was dead. He had killed it himself. And yet the leg had moved, as if for one instant the spark had reached down into dead tissue and called it briefly back to life. He hung frog legs on brass hooks from

There is a thing that happens to some people right before they die, and it is so strange and so consistent that doctors have given it a name. They call it terminal lucidity.