Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death

https://hyperallergic.com/720694/science-confirms-that-life-flashes-before-the-eyes-upon-death/

by relaunched • 4 years ago

226 204 4 years ago

rich_sasha4• 4 years ago

Very interesting, I didn’t realise it’s universality through time.

It would be fiendishly hard to establish causation; does this happen because it is some kind of natural (supernatural?) effect, or is it because people expect that to happen through cultural references?

Apparently being shot with small calibre doesn’t make you fall there and then. But since westerns popularised the idea, this is what everyone does (according to QI anyway).

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

That small calibre thing is fascinating. Any readings on it? How do they even validate that does happen?

rich_sasha4• 4 years ago

Depictions and descriptions of being shot from before westerns make no mention of people falling down as if struck by lightning. It’s like there is no expectation that you fall down if stabbed, say.

Apparently...

rich_sasha4• 4 years ago

(Since I can’t edit my response) some context and some further links: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/30212/do-people...

allisdust• 4 years ago

Apparently they found similar waves in rat brains after death before this paper came out. This paper is more about finding the same in humans which they couldn't do till now.

Teletio5• 4 years ago

There is no proof of any supernatural thing ever.

mensetmanusman4• 4 years ago

Many would argue that free will is non-materialistic (extra- or -supra natural), if we have no free will, then these HN comments are inevitable due to the laws of physics though, so no use arguing if it is materialistic since it’s inevitable :)

jollybean4• 4 years ago

"There is no proof of any supernatural thing ever."

? Except you live, breath, walk and act in this universe as though you are literally an incarnation of something 'supernatural' aka 'more than a random bag of rocks'

Scientific Materialism has helped us push aside a lot of Magical Thinking about a lot of things (it was the wind, not a ghost, and there are no Elves in the forest with Gold) ... paradoxically we are not any closer to understanding the nature of ourselves i.e. 'life'

The concept 'life' doesn't have much meaning if it's just some bit of complex mechanics and I suggest even those positing just that don't even contemplate the implications.

We posit that the universe is made up of matter and energy, and everything behaves in accordance with a set of 'rules' because mostly that's what we observe, and beyond that, a lot of people are just thinking magically.

By definition, we may have ruled out the possibility for 'life' by our own, reductive and narrow metaphysical definition.

We've made a 'ruler' to measure the Universe that is just incapable of measuring many things, even those things happening right before our eyes, we trust the 'ruler' as 'truth' and that's that.

It'd be nice if we had some developments in metaphysical thought these days, we've been ignoring it for a while.

asdff3• 4 years ago

Plenty of hunters with 22s would probably differ that a bullet can't drop a living being instantly.

rich_sasha4• 4 years ago

I’m no firearms buff, I though .22 rifles are good for squirrels and such likes? Relative to the size of the target, .22 is a pretty big calibre I’d think.

geuis• 4 years ago

Link to the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.8135...

I don't want to cast aspersions on the submitted site, but I believe it's better to submit the source material rather than a 3rd party's interpretation.

mellosouls• 4 years ago

I think if the 3rd party summary is balanced enough and the original clearly linked in it, I'd generally prefer the non-academic version as a first intro.

bobitsaboy• 4 years ago

Appreciated when the 3rd party's website throws up a demand to subscribe to their newsletter and no user-friendly options to close said demand.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Not scientific and I'm not sure linking this is allowed, but lots of anecdata here pointing to this experience as well

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/s0oj2w/redditors...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/26xdbe/serious_w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/latterdaysaints/comments/1egept/som...

here is a segment

My sister was shot while she was walking her dogs in our small town in Alaska. The bullet ricocheted around piercing her bowel in 9 places. Even though we had one of the best Rhode's Scholar docs in the north at our ER and the only flight out of town was miraculously minutes away from takeoff and held up to fly her to Anchorage, she bled out and died on the operating room table. She knows because she vividly remembers everything the surgeons said as she lay dead on the table. What she told me later is remarkable: She recalls drifting up and into a very bright light. She was no longer in pain, and felt compelled to travel into the brilliance. It lead to an amazing river. Seriously, the look on her face when she describes this place helps me realize that radiant, endless joy is not just a possibility but an eventuality. She describes playing in a river that consisted of pure knowledge. Anything she ever wanted to know was at her fingertips. As she played in this amazing river she could sense figures on the distant shore. They were our people, she explained. Our family. Our animals. All waiting patiently for her to finish playing in the river and wade towards them on the shore. Though she was not ready to leave the marvelous river, she knew without being told that they would wait patiently and joyfully. But she never made it to the shore. As she was playing an amazing thing happened. Seriously, people, if you could see the look on her face when she describes this next part you would laugh for pure joy. A being approached her. She did not know what it was except to describe it as pure, unconditional, ebullient LOVE. It radiated love. It pulsed love. And ALL THINGS diminished before the radiance of that love. The next part makes me chuckle a bit even though that seems out of place. She said it spoke to her and said that she had to go back, that it wasn't her time. She said, like a little kid, "But I don't want to." When she recounts this experience she emphasizes that to be in proximity of that being is ALL THERE IS. She describes it as a completion. A peace. A welcoming. To leave was incomprehensible. But to decline was also incomprehensible. She felt infused with a purpose. Very, very, very reluctantly she returned to life. She is amazing. They patched her femoral artery and explained that the graft would eventually give. In all probability she will die within minutes. Living with that sword of Damocles should be terrifying. No. To her it's a promise that she will get to return. Life is what we are here to do, she explains, but after.....sweet, benevolent, all encompassing love. With every single breath my sister is heartbeats from death, and I have never met anyone who is more alive. Fearless.

OscarCunningham• 4 years ago

lots of anecdata here pointing to this experience as well

In your quote, her life doesn't flash before her eyes.

behringer3• 4 years ago

So there's an alternative phenomenon that keeps a person wanting to continue living. Strange for sure.

grapescheesee• 4 years ago

Much of this story reminds me of Carl Jung's The Red Book.

AndrewOMartin• 4 years ago

It sounds like the brain has a survival mechanism whereby at the point of death it generates the biggest cliché it can.

dmix• 4 years ago

Reads like someone who’s read one too many New Age/meditation books.

orange8• 4 years ago

How exactly does "the brain" generating the biggest cliche movie show dream it can help someone survive?

And what is the difference between "the brain" and the person watching the movie show?

sethammons2• 4 years ago

Maybe something is cliché because it is based on some truth. Maybe.

uuyi• 4 years ago

My cousin went through a similar thing after a bad motorcycle accident. In his case his dreams were terrible creatures torturing him.

I can imagine this sort of experience is where hell and heaven spawned from.

He’s now absolutely fine and doesn’t ride motorbikes and is still a staunch atheist.

motoboi2• 4 years ago

Some near death experiences have a nightmare like structure.

imtringued• 4 years ago

I don't judge anyone for believing this story, you are better off believing the story to keep up your optimism streak and avoid falling into a pessimism streak called depression, but it is either fake or a dream created by the brain. The creature is speaking English, which is a dead giveaway.

bencollier49• 4 years ago

The creature is speaking English.

That's not a very effective counterargument - the being in question could have communicated in any way and the conversation would have been recounted in English later, unless it used interpretive dance or something.

These experiences seem to be very common. The question that I take from them is around the nature of "love", and how fundamental it is. Most religions feature infinite love and benevolence as a feature of God, and we know that the feeling of love in human beings has a biochemical basis. But is it an essential quality of the universe (like, for example, the structure of space)? Does it actually transcend the universe? I believe it does, in some form, but that's a position formed from a combination of faith and reason.

motoboi2• 4 years ago

For those thinking this is too cliché to be true, this has many elements common to near death experience recounts. The bliss, the light, the tunnel or other structure (river in this case) leading to loved ones, an entity explaining the need to go back, the feeling of purpose after.

Not saying that those experiences are real, though. Just that people all over the world have similar near death experiences.

TedDoesntTalk6• 4 years ago

Yes. Read the classic 1975 book "Life After Life" by Raymond Moody who systematically defined these common elements after interviewing thousands of people who had NDEs.

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

You describe cca my experience with stronger doses of mushrooms. Could be interpreted in a very spiritual sense even by atheist/agnostic like me.

All I took from it is how marvelous our brains are, overload/mess with receptors, maybe tweak chemistry a bit, and suddenly you are in unique paradise of beauty no words can hope to describe adequately. You want to cry with joy anytime you remember it, even 15 years afterwards.

Needless to say those experienes didn't make me religious at all, rather explained to me vividly probable source of many religions. Why need to invent a god when man can be enough.

frereubu• 4 years ago

This (including the original paper) is a very liberal interpretation of a small data set. It's an interesting idea, but by definition the data are from a very unusual point in time - at the beginning of brain death - so interpreting them in terms of normal brain activity seems something of a stretch to say the least.

bufferoverflow2• 4 years ago

I had a strange disease a few years ago. I had 4 times when I really thought I was dying, once in the ER. Nothing flashed. I only thought to myself - OK, so that is how I die.

thatwasunusual• 4 years ago

Maybe your life wasn't remarkable enough to be worth replaying. That's what I expect for myself, at least. :)

tobyhinloopen• 4 years ago

Well that’s a depressing comment

to1y• 4 years ago

A slideshow of all your most upvoted comments

xwdv• 4 years ago

Maybe you’ll see a flash of what your best life could have been and the choices you should have made instead.

bufferoverflow2• 4 years ago

My life was actually full of crazy events. I ended up moving all over the globe. Did extreme sports. And other much more dangerous stuff.

telesilla• 4 years ago

I concur. I had an almost-sudden death involving a train (saved by a fast-acting crowd) and I was surprised at how I wasn't frightened, more 'so this is how I die'. Not until I was safe did I panic.

oneoff7863• 4 years ago

Sounds like you were in shock

SnowHill9902• 4 years ago

Maybe you weren’t close enough to death?

CapsAdmin3• 4 years ago

It could also just be that people are different and these experiences reflect more how people deal with intense stress.

jollybean4• 4 years ago

I think it tends to happen when you are really 'that close' and or, you're kind of 'awake' when it's happening, and more likely in moments of acute trauma like car accidents etc..

jotm• 4 years ago

But what triggers it? I believe it's the brain's last attempt to "live" by thinking what it could've done to live (more). Sort of like when poisoned, jumping off a bridge, or just realizing your life is absolute shit.

It also doubles as an escape from the current desperate situation. Ignore the pain and dream.

Memory trips happen quite often with various drugs, too. Or when you're in such extreme pain (broken limbs, etc) your body releases a lot of endorphins which feels a lot like heroin.

mhitza3• 4 years ago

It's probably the end-screen that tallys up your score, before you take of your simulation helmet. A la "Rick and Morty" Roy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as /s

CRUDite4• 4 years ago

What about if cells are shock triggered by g forces to emit certain proteins / chemicals initiating the wave of memory excitation. This could be tested

mhitza3• 4 years ago

"Evidence". The measured activity was the same as of a dream state. "Evidence" that life is a dream?!

arcticbull• 4 years ago

More likely evidence your brain produces a ton of DMT when you’re about to kick the bucket and you go out in one heck of a psychedelic drug trip. [1]

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-21660-002

mettamage2• 4 years ago

Why are we evolved to do this?

mhitza3• 4 years ago

The final section explores whether NDE and DMT experiences have a sufficient degree of phenomenological similarity to justify a causal role for DMT in the production of NDEs and concludes that such similarity is lacking.

From me reading the abstract, doesn't seem like it. But I haven't read the paper, and don't know what "phenomenological similarity" is either.

It would be cool to think that we could trick our brains to do that on demand, without having to experience a near death situation!

I can already imagine the headlines, "Shamans hate him! Learn this one trick how you can too..."

867-5309• 4 years ago

Science CONFIRMS
It’s THOUGHT that these oscillatory patterns, and an increase in gamma waves, SUGGEST memory recall

tl;dr clickbait

yotamoron• 4 years ago

"When he unexpectedly died"?

As opposed to what, an experiment where patients are deliberately killed in the name of science?

spleen• 4 years ago

It’s just clumsy wording. The patient appeared physically fine prior to the EEG scan, otherwise he would have not been there in the first place.

ahmedfromtunis2• 4 years ago

As opposed to the patient being clearly in their latest hours as a living being.

I remember listening to a podcast where they went to nursing homes and talking to nurses on how they can pretty accurately predict that a guest is not going to survive for more than a few hours or till the next week.

(Of course they explain how this is not very scientific and how sometimes they miss the mark. I forgot where it was, but I'm looking for that episode and going to post a link to it when I do find it.)

zikduruqe2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_lucidity

aortega2• 4 years ago

Why would the brain evolve to do this? it has no evolutionary purpose. Once you are dying it doesn't matter what the brain does or feel, it can make you feel bliss or the most unimaginable torture, nothing will help you reproduce more or be more adapted to the environment, you are done.

tetris11• 4 years ago

If you take the position of life being a simulation, it could just be that every entity upon termination, simply summarises key aspects of their life to be forwarded, collated, and further summarised by a higher entity, in order to test some model.

Narretz• 4 years ago

It might just be an artefact of dying or catastrophic emergency that has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure.

XorNot• 4 years ago

The comment (currently) above this one is a pretty good explanation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059618): if there's anything in your memories which will help you escape the imminent death situation, then you might survive. Not doing it is a losing strategy since you're not taking any additional steps to prevent termination of the geneline.

aortega2• 4 years ago

Indeed, it might be useless in a complex life like a human but it might very well save a fish or a rat from being eaten.

throwanem4• 4 years ago

There is no such thing as "evolutionary purpose." Evolution is a stochastic side effect of lossy self-replication. There's no one involved to do any intending.

Traits that don't impact fitness are selected neither for nor against. And there's no distinction you can draw between traits that arise by happenstance and those for any other reason, because there never is any other reason.

So why be surprised that such a (presumably) durable epiphenomenon of human neural complexity, having once arisen by happenstance, should persist? There is quite literally no reason for it not to.

Flankk2• 4 years ago

The probability of a neutral gene becoming fixed is extremely low. It requires a mutation to take a random walk from zero to gene pool saturation. Most neutral traits disappear due to genetic drift, not due to selection pressure. That said, there is no evidence that this is fixed/durable.

ptoo• 4 years ago

But every trait or behaviour that survives on evolutionary timescales does serve (or did serve, in the case of vestigial features) a purpose. I'm not sure what the exact mechanism is for one's life flashing before the eyes, but the researchers mentioned a very specific alignment of brain wave patterns that seems a bit too intricate to be purely random.

For a complex feature to pass through generations, it has to have some relative positive fitness associated with it. If it didn't provide some survival or fitness advantages, random genetic mutations would simply prevent the effect from being created. It is likely a very ancient survival mechanism based on these NDE existing through many different cultures and eras, and possibly not even specific to humans.

ahmedfromtunis2• 4 years ago

Maybe this is too late for evolution to have any say.

The "memories" that flash before one's eyes might just be a byproduct of how the brain is built ― imagine if it had to just dump all the electric charge that was saving all that data.

Whatever it is, however, there's no way the evolutionary mechanisms are going to have any impact. Why? Because memories or no memories, the person is just dying and will not be able to pass this characteristic to their offspring.

I remember reading somewhere that our health degrades as we get old because the factors that cause this degradation occur too late in the human's lifetime, so that no matter if they get them or not, they probably have already passed them (or not) to their children.

Also, maybe this comment[0] can offer a hypothesis on why this is may *be* important evolutionary-wise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059618.

csomar2• 4 years ago

I'd guess this has to do with the brain being electrified. Who the hell knows what the patient has experienced. This is all speculation on the researchers part. It makes for a nice story, however. (see the cultures angle).

DocG• 4 years ago

Well maybe so when you don't die, you are not having pstd of the near death experience and can continue living normally?

Maybe it's nothing to do with dying but more to be mentally stable if you don't die?

oneoff7863• 4 years ago

The brain is a system. That it does weird stuff when flooded with whatever chemicals might be associated with imminent fear of death isn’t that surprising at all.

Not everything happens is a result of evolutionary guidance. Many things are just side effects.

dotancohen• 4 years ago

  > Why would the brain evolve to do this? it has no evolutionary purpose.

Not necessarily. As another commenter speculates, this mechanism may help one remember a similar situation and thus find a solution to prevent death. The person can then go on to father another generation of people with this trait.

asdff3• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_hitchhiking

Svip• 4 years ago

Wait, I thought the purpose of life flashing before your eyes is that the brain is trying to find a past event, that might help avoid the impending death. On QI, though I cannot remember the episode, they told a story of a swimmer, who encountered a shark, and suddenly his life flashed before his eyes, thinking he was going to die. In the slides of memories, he saw his son watching a DVD about punching a shark on the nose. So he did, and it saved his life.

That explanation makes a lot of sense to me. The brain is convinced that death is imminent, and has no time to go through the normal procedure of remembering, so it just pulls up as many memories it can to the forefront, in hope that one of them might provide the answer to prevent death.

throwanem4• 4 years ago

This is exactly the sort of plausible just-so story I would expect from QI.

On another episode, Stephen Fry explains with no doubt equal earnestness that the fins on a Saturn V rocket are there to generate lift as it travels through the atmosphere.

It's fun, as any panel show helmed by Fry certainly would be. But you don't want to put too much faith in what you hear on it, at least in advance of checking with a credible source.

Sholmesy• 4 years ago

They have a pretty solid research team (https://qi.com/elves), and they often do segments about times they've gotten things wrong, or the science has changed etc.

It is first and foremost an entertainment program, so yeah.

wyrm• 4 years ago

I think this is a case of a word having one colloquial meaning and a different technical meaning. If you "lift" something, you're probably picking it up.

In a hydrodynamic sense, "lift" is a force on a foil moving through a fluid. This kind of lift is a force orthogonal to the direction of motion through the fluid and the surface of the foil. That could be upward lift, like that on the wings of an aircraft. That could also be the forward and leeward lift on the sail of a sailboat, or the windward lift on the sailboat's keel. It could also be the lateral, stabilizing lift on the control surfaces of a rocket.

dEnigma• 4 years ago

Funny, I thought I'd previously only heard that from an anime series (Demon Slayer). But since I watched every episode of QI I must've heard it there too. Maybe it was just the repeat mention that stuck. In any case I won't give too much credit to something I've heard on QI and/or Demon Slayer. It is a neat, somewhat poetic, idea though.

huynhhacnguyen2• 4 years ago

That is indeed a convincing argument, and has been portrayed in various contexts, one of which is BBC's Sherlock when ... (oops, spoiler). However, there was no further explanation as to why there is an evolutionary pressure for the brain to do this trick, AFAIK.

oneoff7863• 4 years ago

However, there was no further explanation as to why there is an evolutionary pressure for the brain to do this trick, AFAIK.

Umm… yes there is. It’s a survival mechanism. The premise is self evident for improving evolutionary fitness.

mdp2021• 4 years ago

The team behind QI presents without a hint of awareness values such as "a distance of 16093 metres from A to B", "a distance of 62 miles from C to D", "about 6.56 feet tall"...

(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)

(To the skimmers: when something is 1000 units long, you have to check the underlying precision - whether it is a very rough estimate or the rounding of something like 1000.0862 - and you cannot translate the former retaining fake precision. The distance between London and New York is not 3,417.541 miles, nor 5,632.704 kilometers.)

coastflow• 4 years ago

The standard way to solve this nowadays is to report error measurements, which introductory university physics textbooks teach.

"(And yet once told of that scientist who added 1 metre to his measurement of a mountain, because he feared that the too round number resulting from the computation could have been confused with a rough measurement.)"

The best way to report the precision is with an error measurement (e.g. ±2 feet). This isn't an academic source, but a news article supports this:

From LiveScience [0]:

"Legend has it that when the team took the average of all of those measurements, they found the mountain was exactly 29,000 feet (8,839 m) tall, Molnar said.

"They didn't expect anybody to believe it, so the story is they added 2 feet [0.6 m], just to make it look more believable," Molnar said.

[...]

"Despite sophisticated gravimeters, complicated equations and fancy tools like global positioning systems, the elevation of Mount Everest is only precise to within a foot or two.

"All of our elevations have an error," Molnar said."

[0] https://www.livescience.com/50691-how-to-measure-mount-evere...

SmooL• 4 years ago

I've had something like this happen to me, albeit less serious: I was snowboarding, went over a jump poorly, and found myself totally disoriented as I careened through the air. Every single other the I'd found myself flying through the air flashed through my head at unbelievable speed, in an attempt to search for some past experience to leverage wtf I should do. Ultimately I found nothing, made peace with the fact that I was going to slam into the ground, and promptly did so.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

So you're saying you've forgotten the most important aspect of learning to fly. After throwing yourself at the ground, you have to miss.

JKCalhoun2• 4 years ago

I remember reading in Scientific American (wow, decades ago) an early article on A.I. using a, then new, trained neural network. There was a small comment at the end of the article where the researcher noted that as they "killed" (destroyed somehow?) the neural network, they started seeing early patterns that it had trained on output.

robinsoh• 4 years ago

That is a really interesting observation. I couldn't find such an article. I would love to read it.

thedailymail• 4 years ago

That sounds a lot like the way HAL-9000 regresses to its earliest programming (reciting its "birth" date; singing an old song) when Dave is shutting it down at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

dgellow2• 4 years ago

What is QI?

bartwe• 4 years ago

A British tv quiz show.

WrtCdEvrydy• 4 years ago

British Comedy Show, pretty good.

filoeleven• 4 years ago

It’s a British panel show, formerly hosted by Stephen Fry and now by Sandy Toksvig, where the panelists (most often comedians) are posed questions about science and history which have surprising answers. The name stands for “Quite Interesting,” and it is—along with being a lot of fun. Lots of shorts and full episodes are available on YouTube.

Here is an example: https://youtu.be/44Db0Xt_ykI

agumonkey3• 4 years ago

It might also be a intensity driven effect, I mean, few important moments of your life revolve around important survival information (fond memories, life events etc).. but an oncoming death taps into absolute levels of emotions, which would match the most intense moments of an existence.

Someone• 4 years ago

Doesn’t make sense from an evolution theory viewpoint to me.

If that has advantages to survival, there would have to be many survivors who have experienced this.

Also, I think shark story is different from this one. At no time, that swimmer was about to die (that could change soon, but wasn’t happening yet). His brain was intact, not dying.

My personal (completely unsupported) theory for the case where your brain is actually dying is that it’s plasticity of the brain at work. As brain cells die, the brain moves around the most important stuff to keep it in working cells. That, to me, makes evolutionary sense. You could use that kind of machinery all your life. That it goes into overdrive when it doesn’t help anymore because your entire brain is about to die would be a side effect.

Alternatively, it’s because we’re living in a simulation, and the caches get flushed to more permanent storage, starting with the more important stuff ;-)

marksmith2996• 4 years ago

Doesn’t make sense from an evolution theory viewpoint to me.

If that has advantages to survival, there would have to be many survivors who have experienced this.

Everyone who has ever reported this has survived.

TedDoesntTalk6• 4 years ago

I love hearing from the evolutional theorists. They are like Christian evangelists who cannot fathom other possible realities and motives except theirs. They are so single-minded that it is truly fascinating to watch them explain all phenomena through their lens.

MarionG• 4 years ago

Life flashes before the eyes upon death. In real time.

blenderdt• 4 years ago

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

taneq2• 4 years ago

This process is called 'living.' - Sir Terry

mrleinad3• 4 years ago

I had to read that twice to realize what you were saying. Well played.

TedDoesntTalk6• 4 years ago

I'm a time traveler. I can travel into the future 1 second at a time.

huynhhacnguyen2• 4 years ago

Hope I'm not the only one that clicks on the link mainly because I'm curious to know how they "conducted" such a study. From what stated in the article, is it safe to assume that this has happened only once, ever?

Teletio5• 4 years ago

Im curious how this is different from normal day to day.

I recall memories very often. they are very shallow though.

Like I remember touching the soft inner layer of my kid jacket (it had trains on it) but this is not a very detailed memory at all.

If I'm dying and those shallow memories would pop up, yeah sure why not? But 'life flashes before the eyes' is a very romanticized thing and I do not get why.

Recalling memories btw could also mean recalling any memories. This is probably no effidence for 'life flashes before...'

ad404b8a372f2b9• 4 years ago

It's an involuntary recall of every (or so it seems) memory sequentially at very high speed in very specific circumstances. It's incomparable to just thinking about your childhood.

Teletio5• 4 years ago

It probably seems to be to the people nearly dying.

Is this proof? No.

Is it more realistic that it's more shallow and uncoordinated and you are dying and your brain doesn't work properly currently due to dying?

I would say yes.

CRUDite4• 4 years ago

This happened to me as an 11 or 12 yr old. I was hit by a car that crossed a red light. The moment I was hit I saw my life and memories from it, certain pauses on interactions with key people and there were very overwhelming positive and calm emotions, but I saw everything and indeed strangely carousel style. When I hit the tarmac I was slammed back in real time and was scrabbling to hang on the front of the car as it didn’t stop for 50 yards and was dragging me under.

It had a profound impact on me. It makes sense it’s a human experience that’s ‘an unknown known’. I don’t buy the ‘survival mechanism’ theory, the nature of the experience was not one of search. It was over 30 years ago, but remains something I know to be ‘real’ as a phenomenon

lr4444lr• 4 years ago

This fascinates me. Can you tell me what the perception of time is like for this experience? Obviously it must be extended as compared with waking reality, but how long did it feel like? Was it like a lucid engrossing dream that has a plot that literally feels like many days length, or did you perceive the outside reality moving in more slow motion?

CRUDite4• 4 years ago

I went onto study physics, I used to think about it every now and then. It’s not easy to characterise / quantify an answer but there was no experience of time, I was not aware enough of externalities to know what slow motion would be as that implies a connection to outer time. I don’t remember a cradle to present run through of memories but I certainly saw / experienced a slideshow and then ‘real time’ moments of positive interactions with people, which then moved on. Was that seconds or moments or just memory clusters firing I don’t know. Enough to re live the experience with a different perspective. of course early memories are not (for me)as complex or emotionally involving or nuanced with language so the bulk of memories were from later life. I have no recollection of the composition of ‘the slideshow’ but do remember for eg love for my mother in certain ‘scene(s)’ and that was more of a ‘real-time’ segment. A precession of memories certainly indicates time flow. I was dimly aware of the ground at the last moment as it came towards me and thinking back on it the scenes faded and real time came back along with my sense of the outside world aka the ground.

VHRanger• 4 years ago

The reason time *feels slow* in these catastrophes, AFAIK is that memory formation kicks into high gear during it

Your brain isn't somehow over locking itself, you just remember everything about the event in detail, so it feels like it in retrospect

CapsAdmin3• 4 years ago

When it comes to feeling "slow motion" on psychedelics, it feels like you're just taking in and focusing on too many details so your memory of the experience feels a lot longer than it actually was.

Under normal circumstances when looking at a random car, you most likely just see a car. You've probably seen a car before so it's not something you need to pay attention to.

But under the influence of psychedelics you pay attention to all the details of the car. Like how it's somehow symmetrical in shape, the reflection of the car from the sun, transparent windows that somehow reflects the environment a little bit but is still somehow lets you see the inside of the car, the front part of the car looks like a face, the car is larger than you, etc, etc.

The experience under the influence might feel like it took 2 minutes, but in reality it probably took 10 seconds. It can feel even longer when recalling the memory.

(you might also see things that aren't part of the car but I'm leaving that out here to talk about how long an experience feels like)

mikepurvis• 4 years ago

I wonder if there's a connection here to "dream time", how you can have a dream experience that connects to something waking you up in the real world (a noise, or sensation like cold or wet). But the dream experience of whatever it was feels like it must have taken way longer than the amount of time it actually took you to react to the real world thing.

mysterydip• 4 years ago

I was hit by a car
It had a profound impact on me

I assume this wasn't intentional, but I had to appreciate the pun

CRUDite4• 4 years ago

Thank you! I am walking the dogs in the park and laughed out loud when I read that. It was unintentional to be clear. The experience was real, I wish I had the foresight to notice the pun

warent2• 4 years ago

thank you for sharing. I'm glad you're here today. What do you feel is the purpose of a life review like this?

I don't know that I believe in an afterlife per se, but oblivion also seems unlikely. Something about being an aspect of the infinite universe that continues. stories like yours are very compelling!

TomMasz• 4 years ago

I hit a deer on my motorcycle. I remember nothing between the initial impact and finding myself on my back looking up at the sky. I had been separated from the bike and slide on my side for a considerable distance (only going 30 mph, luckily). Perhaps the flash of life experiences doesn't happen for everyone.

Ozzie_osman• 4 years ago

Perhaps it happens for everyone but in some cases, you black out and forget it.

Fervicus• 4 years ago

I have heard so many people describing the same exact feelings as you, especially the "overwhelming positive and calm emotions" part. It's so fascinating!

mbar84• 4 years ago

I wonder if the memory carousel itself is not so much a survival mechanism, but rather it's a side effect of a survival mechanism. In layman terms, the brain goes into overdrive as it tries everything it can to eek out some minor optimization in your movement, that might help you dodge an arrow. As a side effect everything else in your brain also gets stimulated like never before and for the parts of your brain that we relate to consciousness, the experience is one of explosive recall of memories.

mromanuk• 4 years ago

Wow, I like your theory. Would be really cool if it’s that way. Like when you have tunnel vision during a fight and your hands get numb

taylorius2• 4 years ago

Who knows? It might be a quick-recap-so-we're-all-on-the-same-page before the appointment with St Peter and his scales for all we can determine.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

I’ve fainted once before and fell over backwards onto the ground. When I came to it was like a reboot of life. I saw leaves in gray up close near my eye and I then flashed back into who I was and what I had been doing. It was as if a second before everything had been simply gone and it didn’t leave or go with any warning or flash, just nothingness and then life again.

What happened is that I badly sprained my ankle and sat on a outdoor wall to recover. The blood rushed to my ankle and away from my head. When this happens the body’s response is to faint to get flat and allow blood to flow back to your brain.

jrootabega• 4 years ago

I'm not saying there COULD not be a benefit to this kind of behavior, but it also wouldn't require much more than two already accepted brain behaviors. We dream, sometimes vividly, sometimes incorporating things we've done or regretted, or things that seem to define us. And some experiences, particularly smells, can suddenly bring back memories you didn't even know you had. So we have the ability to recall things unexpectedly, or maybe just suppress them in normal routines. (I'm not suggesting "suppressed memories" as is usually understood.) It's not a bad hypothesis that the brain, in extreme moments, would enter a dreamlike state with long-buried memories.

DougN72• 4 years ago

I’ve experienced this. Someone pulled a gun on me with the intent of killing me. Past memories flashed by incredibly fast in a slideshow sort of format, all in a second or so. I don’t know why it happened, but I figured my mind was trying to find a way out of the situation.

belzebalex• 4 years ago

How did it end?

warent2• 4 years ago

he died

DougN72• 4 years ago

Well it turned out to be a personal and even sacred experience so I don’t discuss it with very many.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

The time I was mugged at gunpoint by two guys was a surreal experience. It was such a calm experience in the sense that neither of the two muggers were aggitated or excited. There was only one gun. During the entire interaction, there were many thoughts of movie like scenes on how to disarm the gun and extricate myself from the situation like a scene from a movie. Having absolutely 0 training in any kind of self defense, I chose to not do anything and walked away unharmed and just lighter in cash. The only thing that changed from that is it was the absolute last time I've carried cash.

p1mrx• 4 years ago

The only thing that changed from that is it was the absolute last time I've carried cash.

"Give me your money!" "I don't have cash on me." "Oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day."

zild3d• 4 years ago

walked away unharmed and just lighter in cash. The only thing that changed from that is it was the absolute last time I've carried cash.

I would have a much different takeaway - you got to walk away because you had some cash.

flawn• 4 years ago

Anyone knows if this can also be reproduced by animals?

agumonkey3• 4 years ago

There's a reddit story of a dude who had the mirror experience. After some blunt trauma, he fell on ground unconscious, during that time he experienced a lifelike dream of a whole existence (job, meeting a girl, getting married, buying a house, etc). Unrelated: but he was traumatized waking up realizing his dream reality was gone.

World of memories and dream is strange.

nathias• 4 years ago

This is a very well known and documented phenomenon, it's called lies on the internet.

mrleinad3• 4 years ago

It sounds too similar to certain sci-fi stories [1][2] that it warrants taking it with a grain of salt, I have to say.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...

[2] https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Roy:_A_Life_Well_Lived

Mezzie3• 4 years ago

I know other people think it's a lie, but I think it's possible albeit embellished.

I lucid dream regularly (about 90 percent of dreams I remember, I"m lucid; easily a few times a week for a couple of decades), and visit the same places and people fairly often. I also have a more 'complete' dream experience than a lot of people (apparently) in that it's a full sensory experience and I can read/write in my dreams.

I definitely have had dreams I don't want to leave (or, vice versa, there are some dreams + recurring locations I ALWAYS leave), and some that make me feel very sad when I wake up because of the loss. If I were in a coma, I could see something like that happening.

agumonkey3• 4 years ago

Grief is often a loss of future that won't happen.

dom96• 4 years ago

Honestly surprised there isn't a religion that revolves around the belief that we are transported to an alternate reality/parallel universe when we dream. Certainly a much more fun belief than any of the other major religions out there now.

thebestreadmill3• 4 years ago

The carousel metaphor reminds of when I smoked opium mixed with paracetamol in the golden triangle with the natives all night in their hut.

There was a period of time when my eyes were open yet in my mind a rolodex of motion scenes were flipping in my mind at a speed that I could understand each scene on each card.

Then the doctor(man manning the bamboo pipe) said to take a break. So I shifted out of smoke rotation and left the others enjoy.

Outside the hut in the middle of the night other natives were hunting in pitch dark with homemade rifles.

Really cool experience.

saimiam2• 4 years ago

natives

Did you mean “locals”? Don’t think I’ve heard anyone call locals “natives” in my 25+ years of reading stuff on the internet.

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 years ago

Come to New Mexico. There's "natives", "locals" and everyone else.

thebestreadmill3• 4 years ago

Well these were native tribes that have been living in these mountainous jungles for a long time.

For me, I associate the label "locals" with a slightly more "modern" society which has been converted to modernism a certain amount.

In no way did I mean to demean them if that is where you are going with this. :)

But you can certainly call them locals if you wish.

BobbyJo• 4 years ago

where I'm from, native means you grew up there, local means you live there, everyone else is just visiting.

gavinray2• 4 years ago

Wh-what? Opium mixed with Tylenol?

Is this GPT3 or a weird troll or what.

thebestreadmill3• 4 years ago

no, this is real and it was awesome. but maybe an AI could generate this. in which case maybe it would pass the turing case for this event.

another person told me that the mix might have occurred to reduce the effects or maybe cut it to have more opium to smoke, idk

verisimi• 4 years ago

Can it possibly be that the physical, material reality we all know and love is actually an illusion, and that we are really spiritual creatures, that we have a life review in death, as evidenced by the testimony of thousands of NDEs (near death experiences) and OBEs (out of body experiences)?

TedDoesntTalk6• 4 years ago

Many here on HN will laugh at you because there's no peer-reviewed, double-blind, placebo-controlled study for that. Or clearly your are confusing causation and correlation :)

Qub3d• 4 years ago

One thing that both terrifies and, oddly, comforts me is that when we zoom out to the highest scales of the universe, its clear that there are questions we cannot answer.

Its like the halting problem for metaphysics.

zerop• 4 years ago

That eastern tradition says that one may see future of family at this time.. there are many..

macspoofing• 4 years ago

defined as when the brain has transitioned into preparing for deathdefined as when the brain has transitioned into preparing for death

why would there ever be a "death preparation" module in the brain?

Proudmuslim• 4 years ago

We were created after all

jollybean4• 4 years ago

I was in a snowmobile accident as a young man and it happened to me.

It's like time stands still for a moment and you get to revisit some fairly important memories stored away in vivid detail.

It's odd to fathom the evolutionary reason for that.

As someone who takes a slightly different metaphysical perspective than 'scientific materialism' ... I think there's something 'a bit more' going on.

behringer3• 4 years ago

Did it help you to survive in some way?

jollybean4• 4 years ago

I don't think so. Maybe. I have no idea. I think dying would have been a bit easier but I'm not sure how that even helps the species.

pmoriarty2• 4 years ago

One single EEG (not even an MRI) of one guy before he died.

This is very weak evidence, bordering on anecdote, from which we can't generalize to anyone else.

Even for this one guy, the EEG patterns "suggest memory recall". We don't know what was actually going on in his mind. Maybe he was remembering something. Maybe. Maybe it was of a grocery list. We have no idea.

Even if it was a memory of his entire life -- a big stretch, given the very, very weak evidence -- it could have happened purely by chance.. that he happened to be remembering something, and that happened to be a memory of his life.

It doesn't mean that that happens to everyone else.

This whole article is very low content, and the "evidence" for what it claims is very poor.

ciphol• 4 years ago

One EEG suggesting memories, out of one EEG which possibly could have suggested memories.

Sure, it would be nice to have more than one data point, but I think when that data point corroborates what many people have reported based on their experiences, it's worth something.

pmoriarty2• 4 years ago

"One EEG suggesting memories, out of one EEG which possibly could have suggested memories."

Memories of what, though? We have no idea.

Weak evidence that one guy maybe* remembered something before he died is virtually worthless.

The article's claim that "Science Confirms That Life Flashes Before the Eyes Upon Death"* is hyperbolic and completely unwarranted.

Bolkan• 4 years ago

I know. It's happening to me right now.

voakbasda• 4 years ago

These experiences fall into the same category of phenomenon as seeing ghosts, UFOs, and so on. Occam’s Razor applies.

Our brains and senses are stupidly fallible and almost completely untrustworthy. Moreover, interpretations of EEG scans are highly subjective, given that we still don’t full understand the brain… much less its emergent behavior that we call the mind.

I find it easier to believe that these researchers have found a way to confirm what they want to believe, rather than objective measures of a real phenomenon. Extraordinarily claims require extraordinary proof, and I do not see that here.

cersei• 4 years ago

This is more metaphysical than scientific (but could have a multidimensional scientific basis)... I had a near death (or perhaps actual death) experience as a child where my life flashed by, however it was ever so slightly different from the life I knew (in a butterfly effect kind of way), which then prevented me from dying. It felt as if history had changed or my consciousness joined a parallel timeline where I was still alive. What made me think this way is that I seemed to have retained memories from the original past and not the current one, them being mostly similar events, but in slight differences in timing & order (which ended up making a big difference for me). I of course always tried to assess if this was some form of psychosis or error (assuming that to be the case), but I seemed to know a variation of real events that had not been shared with me (due to the timing differences, e.g. something happening before my birth rather than after it).

Anyway, as a fun thought experiment... If your near death experience was indeed history rewriting itself ever so slightly, and even if you retained memories from it, would you be able to tell? You can't be fully certain that all of the people share exactly the same history the way you remember it (and you'd be likely to dismiss yours as an erroneous memory.)

iw0• 4 years ago

Same happened to me as a child. I fell down in a deep pool and start sinking. After some time of trying to escape and seeing just water bubbles suddenly pictures of my life started flashing. They looked like photos of random moments with my family changing really fast and continued few seconds before the life guard pull me out. I didn’t really think I would die at that time so seems that the life flashes were completely unconscious.

Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death

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