First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)

https://louisville.edu/medicine/news/first-ever-recording-of-a-dying-human-brain-shows-waves-similar-to-memory-flashbacks

by thunderbong • 9 months ago

290 281 9 months ago

louisville.edu

vermilingua2• 9 months ago

I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.

system2• 9 months ago

Must be a wild experience to be hooked up to a bunch of test machines while dying on schedule.

Noumenon722• 9 months ago

Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.

dmacedo• 9 months ago

What a weird way of phrasing that. The whole point of ethics in multiple disciplines is to try and study the principles of humanity in the society we've formed. The areas of philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion are filled with centuries of discussions trying to argue and explain a lot of these matters.

But the philosopher of the Internet of today, instead of curiosity of reasoning and arguing for what should change in deontology, and why; sums it up as "ethicists forbid...".

I'd really like to understand your views better on what should change and why...

Especially when there's plenty of ignoring of ethics in today's world!

hurrckplgbd• 9 months ago

If we were to abolish ethics in research, would you volunteer to be experimented on without bounds?

Sam6late• 9 months ago

I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.

matwood• 9 months ago

I went out to a loop choke once in BJJ. I wasn’t out long, but I wondered after if that’s what death is like - a flash of thought and that’s it.

lynx973• 9 months ago

I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.

https://youtu.be/ET71mabgEuM

sokoloff• 9 months ago

Given I’m going to die anyway, I’d readily do it. How else will we increase our understanding of the brain’s experience of dying? And it seems that even beyond the mere understanding, we might be able to prepare for and manage short-term care of imminent organ donors as just one concrete case.

BriggyDwiggs42• 9 months ago

I don’t think most people have the perspective that you do.

jbstack3• 9 months ago

It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.

In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.

NaomiLehman• 9 months ago

"Science can fuck off" - reminded me of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. I a good way :)

vermilingua2• 9 months ago

I don’t see any reason why this would have to be an uncomfortable experience. A study with this kind of potential could easily get funding to relocate necessary equipment to a home or chosen location (assuming the participant is able to die outside hospital), and once the equipment is set up and running it’s unlikely that operators would even need to be present.

exe345• 9 months ago

Science can fuck off

not all of it, presumably, if you want to express your distaste on the magical glass slab and you want pain killers on your way out.

TheCoelacanth• 9 months ago

Why do people write wills? Why do people leave messages for their loved ones before they die? Why do people donate organs?

Because they care about leaving behind an impact after they die. I don't think it would be for everyone, but there surely be some people who would want to do this.

eszed• 9 months ago

I'd sign up for this without a second's hesitation. I actually had the thought of "how could I volunteer?" while reading the article. My personal primum mobile is learning - I'm curious (to some extent) about (nearly) everything - and along with that goes an urge to help satisfy other people's curiosity.

I'm curious about my death, too! I've sat with people who are very close to that edge, and I realize it's the last experience I'll ever have, the last lesson I'll ever learn, and find it poignant that I won't be able to tell anyone else about it. Being part of an experiment like this would be... satisfying, somehow. It feels like it would give meaning to my death.

I respect that you have a different point of view, but I hope that helps you understand what would motivate someone to do something like this.

bongodongobob• 9 months ago

Lmao. "After you're dead, let us know how it went."

hydrogen7800• 9 months ago

This reminds me about the movie "Flatliners"[0] in my need-to-watch queue. Maybe this weekend.

[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/?ref_=fn_t_2

jodrellblank• 9 months ago

Put in your reading list The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allen Poe

“I say to you that I am dead!”

- https://www.online-literature.com/poe/30/

ttcbj• 9 months ago

I agree. I read an article a few months ago about how frequent MAID (medical assistance in dying) is in Canada. I am surprised that that has not led to larger scale studies about the dying process.

In this particular case, the press release notes "Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling...". That does seem to limit how much can be generalized from this one case. A larger study of MAID patients would be more useful.

Edit: Maybe the issue is that the MAID itself would alter the brain state. That actually seems pretty plausible.

AndrewKemendo3• 9 months ago

I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.

It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.

Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.

baddash• 9 months ago

what was it like for you

AndrewKemendo3• 9 months ago

From a personal experience perspective It’s a trip and like nothing else you’ve experienced.

The only thing I can metaphorically compare it to is what it looked like when Neo got pulled out of the matrix in the movie.

mahrain• 9 months ago

Without spoiling too much, this is a major theme in Dan Brown's latest novel 'the secret of secrets'.

sans_souse• 9 months ago

Hmm is it worth the read? edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for worthwhile reading

1f60c• 9 months ago

I added it to my reading list!

ggeorgovassilis• 9 months ago

they areare mystical or part of their mental work.

In ancient Greece, epilepsy was called the "holy disease" and it was believed that gods speak through the patient during a seizure.

scns• 9 months ago

Saulus fell off his horse when "god spoke to him". Afterwards he converted and became Paulus.

cantor_S_drug2• 9 months ago

Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes Epilepsy and God - Part 1

https://youtu.be/qIiIsDIkDtg?si=bIjpz5mWHEbN_NDI

owl_vision• 9 months ago

Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes and God - Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z4B5BYbjf8

AndrewKemendo3• 9 months ago

This is great! Very much reflective of my experience

BoredPositron• 9 months ago

I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.

djmips• 9 months ago

I presume your colleague was dead for more than 7-8 minutes... That was gallant of you.

Someone• 9 months ago

FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”

They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.

Modern medicine definitely doesn’t use “has no heartbeat == is dead”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_death#Medical_declaratio... adds “irreversible” to the definition:

“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”

(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)

IshKebab• 9 months ago

Also the question is incorrect. There isn't an exact time when someone dies.

jimmaswell• 9 months ago

Relevant: https://youtu.be/ibpdNqrtar0

netdevphoenix• 9 months ago

Given that we don't really have a precise definition of "alive", it should not be surprising that we are unable to tell the precise moment a person dies.

tirant3• 9 months ago

I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away.

However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.

I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.

energy1232• 9 months ago

"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.

baxtr2• 9 months ago

So is it similar to dreaming?

Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?

torben-friis• 9 months ago

I’ve had similar experiences.

In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.

It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.

tirant3• 9 months ago

Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up.

As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.

I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.

asimovDev• 9 months ago

huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this

cantor_S_drug2• 9 months ago

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”

In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Firehawke• 9 months ago

Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.

I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.

jonathanlydall• 9 months ago

Had a similar incident in my teens.

I was at scouts and we’d set up a monkey swing on a branch next to a river.

While I was on it, I somehow realised the knot on the branch was coming undone and was able to witness its unravelling in slow motion.

The fall was also slow, as I hit the ground I cried out, but more from shock than any pain.

Very luckily I had landed on the soft sandy riverbank rather than the rocks in the river I had been above just moments before.

barrenko2• 9 months ago

"With effortless focus, Munenori Sensei smoothly pulls the arrow to bend his bow. Released like a ripe fruit, the arrow glides. It races toward your heart.

In the eternity of the arrow’s flight, you wonder: What is this present moment? Confronting its end, your mind becomes razor sharp, cleav- ing time into uncountable, quickly passing moments.

At one such perfect instant you see the arrow as it floats, suspended between the finest ticks of the most precise clock. In this instant of no time, the arrow has no motion, and nothing pushes or pulls it toward your heart. How, then, does it move?

While your beginner’s mind embraces the mystery, the arrow flies."

mr_toad6• 9 months ago

It’s not surprising that in life threatening situations the brain would focus all of its attention on the immediate situation, rather than worrying about the usual crap the brain worries about (like paying your bills).

breakbread• 9 months ago

Long time ago, while running cat5 in a large open ceiling, I stepped off of a large metal beam onto what I thought was the concrete ceiling of an outdoor awning, but was in fact droptile. Fell right through, of course, and landed more-or-less on my back. The floor was that hard institutional carpet.

I don't remember anything about the fall itself. After hitting the floor I immediately got to my feet, realized the breath had been knocked out of me, tried to call my partner's name, then sat back down. I think the pain came shortly after that.

yolo3000• 9 months ago

I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.

hn_acc13• 9 months ago

10 times? Wow.. That seems like a lot.. AFAIK, even once is indication of potentially serious trauma.

lordnacho2• 9 months ago

For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing.

I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.

Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.

VagabundoP• 9 months ago

Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually.

And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.

seemaze• 9 months ago

My first time I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backwards from 100. I assumed the process would take 30 to 60 seconds. I don't think I even hit 97..

avh02• 9 months ago

Had the same experience, what scared the crap out of me is that feeling of not even knowing you're out is how some people spend their last moment.

Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while

MisterTea• 9 months ago

Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning.

Same. I was put under twice and both times it was like someone flipping a switch from conscious to unconscious. When I woke up it was like nothing happened save for a slight groggy feeling. It was not like sleep where you feel rested, as if you lost time.

edit: to add when going under the first time I was laying down on the operating table as the anesthesiologist made small talk with a nurse I suddenly felt super high while the room started to spin - POOF out.

scruple• 9 months ago

I've only been put under once and it was when I was very, very young (3 for hernia surgery, I'm in my mid-40s now) and I had a similar experience, except I came to ~half way through and picked up my head, wondering what the fuck was happening to me, before promptly being put under again. It's my earliest memory but it's also one of the only strong memories I have before 6-7 years old.

fortran77• 9 months ago

They usually ask me to "count backwards from 10". I don't think I get down to 0. It's _very_ fast.

m463• 9 months ago

I had a procedure recently and the description in the preparation instructions said "you won't be asleep, but you might not remember everything"

I talked to the nurse about this as I was prepping for the procedure, and he said that a recent patient talked throughout the procedure, but when he got back to his room afterwards, he asked "so when will the procedure start?"

So, I think the drugs you get might let experience everything. But the "nothing in between" might actually be memory loss, not loss of consciousness.

all this stuff is spooky and philosophically tricky.

mr_toad6• 9 months ago

I thought I would gently fall asleep , but it was actually extremely fast.

Sometimes people fall asleep that way too, especially when very tired. The expression ‘out like a light’ seems apt.

kulahan• 9 months ago

I got put under as a teen for an appendectomy. Shocking. I was absolutely 100% certain I'd stay awake while counting until I hit at least 2-3. I think I made it to 8, then yeah - just like a scene change in a show. I was simply suddenly somewhere else - the recovery room. Apparently I tried to fight the nurses because I wanted to lay on my side (that had JUST been cut open)? I literally have no memory and apologized profusely. I don't even know how that happened - I'm not a violent man. I've been in one (very minor) fight (middle school), and I'm super easy-going in general. It takes a LOT to get under my skin.

fallingfrog• 9 months ago

Yes, I experienced the same, it was like what they call in cinema a "jump cut". I remember the doors to the OR opening, then bang i was in a bed in the recovery room. Like the universe glitched.

igleria• 9 months ago

Last time I had a medical intervention with propofol I returned so relaxed that I thought I had died and was in the afterlife.

energy1232• 9 months ago

There was nothing that you remember. That means there probably was nothing, but it's still a distinction that should be noted.

DougN7• 9 months ago

I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.

fancyswimtime• 9 months ago

agree with this; fits with how the brain values recording of memories when adrenaline is present

iso1631• 9 months ago

I got knocked off my bike about 20 years ago and was unconcious long enough that an ambulance had arrived.

I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.

paufernandez• 9 months ago

Same here, I flew head first down a ramp because I slammed the breakes too hard and the next thing I remember is people asking if anybody had a handkerchief or something, since my head was bleeding. A solid five minute blackout.

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.

iberator2• 9 months ago

I had similar expirience. Time slowed down like 500x, and I had dream like visions and flashbacks - all within 1,2 seconds before hitting the ground.

From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.

EvanAnderson• 9 months ago

I once lost consciousness after a bad bike wreck that left me bleeding significantly from both knees. I lost consciousness while sitting on a bench waiting for my wife to arrive after walking my bike back to the trail head.

I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench.

The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again.

Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.

rpmisms• 9 months ago

It's an amazing sensation. Not a pleasant one.

gaoshan• 9 months ago

all of my incidents of losing consciousness were absolute voids to me. Once I apparently hit the back of a car on my bike and I just kind of woke up with no idea what had happened (I say "apparently" because I don't really know... I was riding my bike and suddenly I was laying on the side of the road, no in between. The other time my father punched me in the face, knocking the back of my head into the corner of a metal oven hood. I remember that but then the next thing was coming to on the ground with him over me, hands around my neck squeezing. Nothing whatsoever in between the start and end of events.

_2zip• 9 months ago

When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.

Reflecticon• 9 months ago

I'm sorry that happened to you. That's so horrible. Wanna make me beat up bullies, man. Got damn bullies.

kakacik• 9 months ago

Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.

I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.

What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.

squarefoot2• 9 months ago

Most bullies just vent out what they suffer at home, school or workplace. They already punish themselves by not reacting against the real source of their problems.

objektif2• 9 months ago

I do have dreams of beating up bullies. Count me in.

gchamonlive4• 9 months ago

I'm not saying you should forget it, but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.

foxyv• 9 months ago

My brother picked me up by the neck once. I still have nightmares about it. Kids are so insanely cruel.

discordance• 9 months ago

Caught this podcast recently on near death experiences (NDE), which discusses some of the recent research as well as spiritual factors:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/godforbid/near-death-...

INTPenis• 9 months ago

This is my nightmare. That me dying will feel just like my regular nightmares that I have today, which are all about common day stressful situations like not finding my partner in a crowd, or constantly chasing the same person and never catching up to them.

An anxiety filled death is what I have coming.

nurettin• 9 months ago

Perhaps a peaceful and serene death doesn't exist despite what people would like to believe so you won't be missing out.

sophrosyne42• 9 months ago

I feel for you INTPenis

sush16122• 9 months ago

Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.

nlitsme• 9 months ago

It is the brain uploading it's memories to the afterlife.

karlkloss• 9 months ago

This is giving me "Brainstorm" vibes.

If you haven't watched the movie, now would be a good time.

andrehacker• 9 months ago

Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)

The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).

artur_makly2• 9 months ago

Her death was even more mysterious https://people.com/natalie-wood-death-legacy-what-to-know-86...

artur_makly2• 9 months ago

Thanks for sharing this gem.

ExoticPearTree3• 9 months ago

I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).

But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.

And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.

Gooblebrai• 9 months ago

Could you share the link to that article?

ExoticPearTree3• 9 months ago

Sorry, but it is something I read a while back. If I find it again and don't forget, I will share.

xboxnolifes• 9 months ago

Wouldn't your life flash before your eyes on every new bad event then? Like your first cut?

ExoticPearTree3• 9 months ago

I guess the example I gave was a bit dumb.

meindnoch• 9 months ago

A good example of what we call a "just so" theory.

Agraillo• 9 months ago

Finding the article is a good case for AI chats, particularly ones with the direct links from the web in the answer. I tried perplexity and google ai mode, both failed

2OEH8eoCRo0• 9 months ago

I always figured it's cerebral death spasms which will cause experiences encoded to those patterns or neurons.

silveira2• 9 months ago

I was reading the comments trying to find something similar to this. I remember reading a similar explanation. The brain in a ultimate attempt of solving that fatal situation goes deeply thought memories to find anything that could help. Evolutionarily, this would make sense.

goopypoop• 9 months ago

imagine your life is flashing before your eyes and you're remembering reading this comment

NetOpWibby• 9 months ago

Thanks a lot, goopypoop, I hate it.

mr_toad6• 9 months ago

What if reading this comment is the life flashing before your eyes?

JohnnyLarue• 9 months ago

A dataset of one (1), eh? And epileptic to boot.

iberator2• 9 months ago

It always starts with 1 :)

Pixelbrick• 9 months ago

Can't think of a way that brains doing this is adaptive in an evolutionary sense.

awb• 9 months ago

Some hypothesize that flashbacks might be the brain searching for relevant useful memories, or hallucinating if it can’t find any. Or, perhaps emotions or physical issues cause your brain to function differently and it’s not an adaptive trait.

Time slowing down does seem useful in the event you can actually affect your circumstances.

qgin• 9 months ago

Hard to select for adaptive traits for something that only happens just before you die.

helsinkiandrew• 9 months ago

But as the person had epilepsy, which happens as a result of "abnormal electrical brain activity", I wonder how general those results are. I'm surprised this hasn't been done on a 'healthy' patient

Quitschquat• 9 months ago

I usually discard studies with sample sizes of 1

64718283661• 9 months ago

If your perception of time is distorted in those last moments, perhaps you live another thousand or million years in what was your life in what was only a few seconds for the people watching you die. After this thousand or however many years you experienced, you are ready for the experience to be over.

Now what happens to people who are shot directly in the head with a gun? Or have their brain otherwise abruptly massively damaged.

anthk2• 9 months ago

Interesting. I am no expert but this might be related to photonic luminiscent emission while on stress as it happens with almost every living being.

ASalazarMX• 9 months ago

You mean light? How is this related to regular emission of light?

anthk2• 9 months ago

https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/the-secret-glow-of-life-how... this

DamnInteresting• 9 months ago

Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.

6d6b73• 9 months ago

What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about? If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience. However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..

abe94• 9 months ago

The new dan brown book uses this as a central concept in the story

bena3• 9 months ago

It's kind of the central concept of the 1990 movie Flatliners as well.

JKCalhoun2• 9 months ago

I have been unable to find the article since—I think it must have been Scientific American. Perhaps in the 1980s.

In any event, it described training a neural network, perhaps it was number recognition. The author said that when they "destroyed" the network it began to have "flashbacks" that resembled early training sessions.

That always stuck with me.

zknowledge• 9 months ago

Was it this Geoffrey Hinton paper? It was in Scientific American in 1993.

Simulating Brain Damage:

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/sciam93.pdf

JKCalhoun2• 9 months ago

I don't think so. When I just asked an LLM though, the Hinton paper also came up. So it does look like a strong candidate.

If I am able to find it, I'll comment here.

aantix• 9 months ago

Are there any software engineers here that believe in the afterlife?

QuadmasterXLII• 9 months ago

You can find some on the right wing catholic rationalist community on substack, I say without a hint of irony. The topic of the day is whether cloud droplets preferentially scatter forward, as pertains to the miracle at fatima

AnimalMuppet• 9 months ago

Sure. It's not just atheists here. There's a fair number of Christians (Catholic, Protestant, some Orthodox). There's some Muslims and Jews. Hindus, if you count reincarnation as an afterlife. Probably some that I have missed.

3pt141592• 9 months ago

I’ve had a wild life. I was a Protestant for over thirty years and I became a Catholic around two years ago. I’ve had more than a few demons attack me and two confirmed good spirits, probably angels. The test for spirits is to get them to agree that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. It’s sometimes difficult to understand them, but anyway I really believe the Bible and supernatural stuff. If anyone on here wants to reach out my email is in my profile.

aj_hackman2• 9 months ago

What pushed you to Catholicism? I see the Catholic church as an amalgamation of human innovations that attempt to turn focus away from Christ and towards the inevitably sinful authority of the church. As much as I can't stand the watered-down one-size-fits-all non-denominational sermons of my youth, or the few fire and brimstone sessions I've been witness to, at the very least their prayers go directly to God.

mr_toad6• 9 months ago

If there’s an afterlife, then doesn’t it trivialise death? Maybe that’s the point.

Buttons840• 9 months ago

I've been listening to a book: Opening Heaven's Door.

The authors sister was dying of cancer. One morning her sister said she had a strange dream about her father. They later realized that their father had unexpectedly died around the time of the dream. Her sister then went on to have some interesting experiences around her own death from cancer.

The author began talking to people, as part of her grieving, and realized many families have experiences like this, but nobody talks about it.

Eventually she realized why few talk about it:

She was at a social gathering of some kind and was talking about her recent enthusiasm for this sort of spiritual near-death stuff, and she shared her experience with a man, who she mentioned was a tech worker (judge for yourself whether that deserves special mention). The tech worker listened to her experience and then felt it was his place to tell the author that it was all coincidence or hallucinations created by a dying brain. She then points out that the guy had no special training that makes his opinion any more respectable than hers. The tech guy knew how to use computers, he wasn't a neuroscientists or a doctor or a psychologist, he just felt he knew, probably because he picked up some ideas from Reddit comments or something, and he had to share his opinion.

Anyway, I hold out some hope that there might still be some mysteries in this world.

kbelder• 9 months ago

The guy was obviously non-empathic and impolite, and probably clueless that he was causing distress. The only thing in his favor is that he was correct.

Shocka12• 9 months ago

A lot of people, especially the tech crowd, have been taught in undergrad the importance of critical thinking and evidence supported conclusions. Also, I think the science/mathematical mind is drawn to this line of thinking as well, which is understandable. I know extremely well how they feel, as I've always operated the same way.

That is why faith in some kind of God or afterlife goes against everything we in the tech crowd are trained to do. The hardest thing about being a Christian or believing in an afterlife IMO is the faith aspect itself.

vivzkestrel• 9 months ago

The way i like to think of this is along the lines of mathematics as usual. Because everything we observe in this universe so far adheres to mathematics except the inside of a blackhole, what happens after death also remains one of the many infinite possibilities. one possibility is that nothing happens and you are just gone gone. Another possibility is that you get reincarnated based on your karma. Another possibility is that you go to heaven or hell. Another possibility is that something entirely different happens as soon as you step outside this spacetime continuum because death takes you outside this thing for sure. There could be another infinite list of possibilities that none of the religions and none of the humans have accounted for

za3faran• 9 months ago

Yes, many.

hulitu• 8 months ago

Are there any software engineers here that believe in the afterlife?

No, they rewrite it from scratch, everytime. /s

squidsoup3• 9 months ago

In the 90s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman proposed in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule that large quantities of DMT (an endogenous psychoactive substance), are released into the brain upon death. I don't know that we have any clear evidence of this, but its certainly an interesting perspective on what might account for near death, and death experiences.

observationist2• 9 months ago

Traumatic events, like NDEs, tend to come with lots of adrenaline, stress hormones, and a cocktail of neurotransmitters that could have the secondary consequence of slowing overall monoamine oxidation, similar to MAOIs, resulting in longer effective exposure to any chemicals like DMT that would normally be transient.

You at most have around 250 μg in your system, you need at least 40 times that to get to the lower threshold of a psychedelic effect. If other factors are in play, and it doesn't get immediately metabolized because of everything else consuming the MAO supply, then it's plausible that there could be an effect.

If that were the case, then you're looking at a potential last-ditch survival mechanism, reinforcing the experience and "fuzzing" the memory for maximum impact.

squidsoup3• 9 months ago

There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:

In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).
The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088236/

Presumably only 20% of the rats were religious.

junto• 9 months ago

The interesting thing about DMT is that it’s an ego-stripper. You have no sense of self. You are non-corporeal. Time and space are irrelevant.

People who have taken DMT find it very difficult to explain what the visions mean when they flash before your eyes. “Flash” in the sense that they are so fast and from every conceivable direction simultaneously and you can see in all directions. And beautifully purple.

Since we are beings that have a conscious “self”, we attribute these moving images to “our lives flashing before our eyes”, but I believe that to be our egotistical selves applying that after the fact.

I now believe that the human brain acts as a filter to a raw stream of collective human shared consciousness, normally out of our grasp.

What people see there is a short temporary window into everyone else’s exact same moment in time.

It’s like a back door hack into god’s admin console and you get to watch the interconnected consciousness of human existence in real time for a few minutes.

However our brains aren’t meant to run unfiltered. Our brains usually optimize and filter as much as they can to conserve energy. We notice the differences and not the usual. Our brains fill in gaps. Eventually the brain overloads as the trip runs to an end and everything goes black. A complete void overwhelms you.

The brain finally reboots and coming back is like watching an old Linux machine reboot, loading its kernel and drivers before adding the OS layers.

First you question what you are, before then discovering who you are. It’s like a process of birth but coming out of hibernation mode for fast boot.

Maybe death is the same. Returning to the collective consciousness.

Like the ant that cannot comprehend the existence of the universe or the neuron that only understands its nearest neighbors, maybe there exists a plane above human individuals as an analogy to the neuron or the ant, that we too cannot not perceive nor understand, because our brains are too small to comprehend it. Only for those fleeting moments when we overclock the system.

JumpCrisscross2• 9 months ago

What's the evidence for the brain being "programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal"?

taneq• 9 months ago

Do non-dying human brains show waves similar to memory flashbacks? What about dead human brains? Just thinking about that study on fMRI and dead trout.

duncancarroll• 9 months ago

It looks like the article cited is from 2022: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/arti...

mmooss• 9 months ago

“Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling – and then it's just one case. So we can't make very big assumptions and claims based on this case. ..."

fnordpiglet• 9 months ago

“””What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries.”””

Centuries?

dmbche• 9 months ago

Arguably there werent neuroscientists 1000 years ago

ryao• 9 months ago

On the spiritual side, I think it is somewhat calming. I face this at times when you have patients that pass away and you talk their families; you have to be the bearer of bad news. Right now, we don't know anything about what happens to their loved one’s brain when they're dying. I think if we know that there is something happening in their brain, that they are remembering nice moments, we can tell these families and it builds a feeling of warmth that in that moment when they are falling, this can help a little bit to catch them.

I do not see any connection between this and spirituality. I also see no reason to think that they must be remembering nice moments. It is possible to be remembering painful moments. This seems especially likely in cases of PTSD.

yieldcrv• 9 months ago

It's just a byproduct of needing to be syndicated at a University in Kentucky

aeonfox• 9 months ago

Spiritual perhaps in that it satisfies a need that cannot be provided by material comforts or by the mere intellectualising of it?

jibal2• 9 months ago

The word "speculated" is doing heavy lifting here.

OfflineSergio• 9 months ago

I the k in cases like this we (researchers) see what their looking for to see.

Nevermark4• 9 months ago

Not exactly the topic - but I went through a strange consciousness bottleneck during a near death experience (in risk terms, not in the medical death sense), in which I was extremely lucky.

A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.

I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.

As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.

The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.

Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.

I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.

Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.

Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.

Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.

Roark664• 9 months ago

Wow, thank you for sharing this. Kudos on surviving this.

I had an interesting experience during a high speed car crash years ago.

I was driving on a newly built motorway going south from Gdansk(in Poland) around 2am, in the rain in a very old rented VW Golf.

Before, when I got to the (cheap)rental place the seatbelt on the driver's side was caught behind the interior plastic panel. The guy that owned the place looked at me (wearing a suit, I just gotten off a plane) and said "You don't mind driving without a seatbelt don't you? This is the only car I can give you." To which I replied "no way", and "do you have a screwdriver"?

Then I proceeded to take off that interior panel. I freed the seatbelt and got on my way. This has saved me from very serious injury.

So, coming back to that moment. I'm driving at around 140kmh (which is normal speed at these roads, only 30kmh over limit). It is raining. I'm coming over a gentle curve and I see red lights of a big truck in my lane, so I flip the indicator with intention to overtake it (still maybe 300m away). As I'm changing lanes closing on it around that gentle long curve I suddenly see there is another set of lights in the left lane in front of the truck. That driver must have got startled by my lights because the moment I saw him his brake lights lit up (and I'm accelerating maybe 150m behind, gaining on him fast). I have to brake hard. I know my Golf at home with my tires would make it. This one didn't.

I lost maybe a third of the speed when it started fishtailing strong. By the time the other cars moved far enough so I could let go the brakes a bit, but instead of straightening it, the car spun sideways and slammed into the barrier.

I remember braking, turning, counter steering like in slow motion, then the last moment once car spun and was just about to hit I thought "That is going to hurt". Last thing I remember was a feeling of surprise how "soft" the crash felt.

I expected to feel a hard slam, it felt like I jumped into a soft bed and suddenly darkness and I feel wet on my hair. An instantaneous transition like in a movie. My first thought is "blood, I'm seriously injured", but no, this was rain. Suddenly I see some light and I remember I sit in a dark smashed up car in a middle of a motorway (it bounced off the barrier) over a hill and another car is quickly approaching without seeing me....

So I jump out of this car and (I didn't feel any injury with so much adrenalin) I push the screeching lump of metal on the driver side pillar as hard as I can, trying to get it off at least the left lane.

Thankfully the other driver saw me from far away, could slow down and stop in time. He helped me push the car onto the shoulder.

When police and ambulance came. The Police guy looked at the car, looked at me and said "where is the driver?" I said "I am" and he says "are you sure? If you're pretending for someone drunk that escaped it is a criminal offense"... Other than few scratches I was completely uninjured. The car looked horrible.

The police guy also said "we're having accidents on this stretch of the road every time it rains, they are going to replace the surface so I'm not going to fine you"... Well, good to know. They did rip it out few months later.

I estimate I couldn't be going that fast during that crash, as I was fine, or maybe I was lucky, but the car was totalled. I remember I paid £750 to the rental guy. That is how much the car was worth in it's entirety...

I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.

Nevermark4• 9 months ago

I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.

That was a great move!

I guess in a thread on an article which mixes a little bit of mysticism into medicine, a little science philosophy fits. I take the plain reading of quantum field equations at face value. I.e. that superposition is real in the normal sense, and that quantum "collapse" is a perceived effect, not actually the superposition reducing to one history, but just the effect of a history becoming entangled with enough particles to be robustly statistically separated from other histories.

(I have never understood why even some scientists can't take the equations at face value, when they already explain why large things don't act like individual particles, despite following the same rules. Without any "observer" voodoo. It as if those scientists agreed the equations say the Earth orbits the sun, and that calculating that way is the right way. But still propose there is some as yet gap in our understanding, that we need to resolve to make that consistent with our perception that the Sun goes around us - despite no actual gap that needs explaining.)

So given that interpretation, we are likely to always (to a high statistical degree) survive scary situations. We may not make it through a high percentage of histories, a high percentage of others' histories may experience us dying, but we of course, are only aware of the histories in which we make it. This also creates an explanation for why we, as a particularly constructed human, exist. We are simply aware of the history in which we are. Not any of the overwhelming number of histories of our universe in which we are not.

Among all the histories of the universe, given that they include every possible (consistent) history, and given that we are just normal chemistry despite our complex construction of statistically unlikely survivals, some have to include us.

That explains (1) our lucky survivals (of ourselves, others certainly experience us dying), (2) our initial personal existence, and (3) the existence of life on Earth. And if there are superpositioned variants of universe laws in a similar fashion (we don't know that yet, but it is a credible idea), (4) why there are histories of universes with laws consistent with us. If it's possible in terms of physical or the ultimate laws, and all consistent possibilities exist, then it is a certainty that there is a version of reality which includes us. And that is of course, where we find ourselves.

sush16122• 9 months ago

ZeWaren• 9 months ago

I wonder if it also happens to people with aphantasia, who are unable to visualize things in their head.

teamonkey• 9 months ago

The article doesn’t specifically mention activity in the visual cortex, just waves associated with memory retrieval.

fourteenrhinos• 9 months ago

Relevant here is the relatively unknown(by modern standards) Hugo Award winner The Terminal Experiment by Robert Sawyer.

Man invents a high resolution brain scanner and is able to identify the exact moment of death. Book largely explores the implications of that and the existence of this tech, all wrapped up with a murder mystery.

Not the best cyberpunk I’ve ever read but a solid read if you find this premise interesting.

thatgerhard• 9 months ago

I once read this thing somewhere, might have been reddit, but the person explained it like this and even if not completely true it makes a lot of sense. When the brain is dying, it searches through past experiences—something it’s never faced before—trying to find a way to survive. That process is what we perceive as life flashbacks.

kderbyma• 9 months ago

Not surprising to anyone who has had a near death experience….

qubex• 9 months ago

An interesting question that arises naturally but is entirely unaddressed in the article is “why (and how) would evolution select for this kind of final behaviour?” Given that by definition the process of death occurs well after the phase of out-reproducing others, how would evolution even have an opportunity to select for this “closing of the curtains” moment. It would have to be the byproduct of something that enhances reproductive fitness during the fertile period or extends that period of fertility. Maybe those who have less traumatic near-death-experiences go on to have children (or more children) than those who faced a nihilistic experience? That really seems to be utterly marginal and likely to be swamped by genetic drift. Also remember that arguably it’s the genes that are using us to procreate, not the other way around (selfish gene hypothesis). I really don’t understand how this could arise, and insofar as I don’t understand how it could arise, I’m fairly skeptical that it’s actually occurring (slightly skewed take on scientific empiricism I know, but I’m a Bayesian at heart).

First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)

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