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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

Literally everyone in these comments has an anecdote, but I remain skeptical. The jump from reduced-dopamine-production to heart-stops-beating is a little hand-wavy.

What is the concrete mechanism? For instance in the opening anecdote in the article, what did the girl die of?

Also I’m put off by statements like “this ability to construct a meaningful (or even possible) path into the future is related to our dopamine circuits”. This has the patina of science, but “is related to” is pretty nebulous and “dopamine circuits” are constructs of the scientists model rather than physical processes in the brain.

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Our expectation of pain actually affects experienced chronic pain. Because it isn't strictly bodily damage that is responsible for "feeling" pain, it is also how our brain processes that sensory information. This is how acute pain becomes chronic, the brain "overfits" for detecting that sensory input from the nerves to try to bring our attention to it more and more, as this might have been evolutionarily helpful. But when under treatment during this era of modern medicine, dwelling on the pain or feeling helpless about it we allow our brain to prioritize the signals as a stressor and increase the "pain volume" which ends up being counterproductive to our daily lives.

Learning this has allowed me to significantly reduce pain medication intake and increase physical activity. Measured and steady physical activity is often the solution for chronic pain, when convention and intuition dictates that rest is the solution. This leads to a cycle of increased stiffness and lack of mobility. Pain isn't "just in your head" but understanding that the pain experience can be mediated in more ways than solely just medication (thankful as I am for it) is empowering and hope inducing.

So all that is to say that I am not surprised if it turns out our mind can affect our body in the ways stated in this article.

I doubt that in any such cases there has been a complex post-mortem investigation to accurately determine the cause of death.

My father died in this way, but I do not know how.

My mother died suddenly due to a stroke. My father obviously became very sad and he said that he had always wished to die simultaneously with her. After less than a week he was dead too.

At that time he had a form of cancer and it was expected that he will live less than a year, but there was no sign that he might die so quickly.

He did not change any of his habits, e.g. he ate exactly like before. During the last 3 days he was hospitalized and apparently he was well taken care of, but that did not help.

Nevertheless, a week was enough for his wish to become true. It seems that he had some sort of renal failure and he died during the night, but how that happened is unknown.

In any case, after this personal experience I have no doubt that people can die when they are convinced that they should.

I hesitate to respond - I lost my dad to cancer and by no means do I want to trivialize anyone’s death. So with all respect and sympathy for your personal loss, that’s not a rigorous analysis.

Had your father not died shortly after your mother he wouldn’t be a data point against the hypothesis, he simply wouldn’t have been included in the dataset.

So if we only are including those who die shortly after an event, what might otherwise have been dismissed as coincidental now looks conclusive.

I agree that is impossible to be certain of a causal relationship between his wish to die and his rapid death.

Nevertheless, as a witness of how that happened, I find it hard to believe otherwise.

Even if he was already ill, until that week the evolution of the cancer had been extremely slow during a couple of years and there had been no signs that the previous forecasts about his remaining lifetime might need any revision.

His condition has deteriorated abruptly in his last 4 days, without any apparent external causes, besides his sadness and wish to die, so I cannot see any other plausible explanation.

While a temporal coincidence cannot be excluded, the circumstances were such that I consider this as extremely unlikely.

Maybe if he had not been already ill, a death wish might not have been able to result in actual death and a weakened body is necessary for the mental state to have a such great influence.

I'm also curious about the rigor of this argument, don't know why you've been downvoted

I am skeptical as well, the article merely presents a theory but no evidence is presented at all.

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