Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death | Hacker News Reader

Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death

hyperallergic.com

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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

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?

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.

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

That's a smart theory. I have another theory: life-review is the simulation diverting additional compute resources to your local "process" to quickly judge whether or not your annihilation would be optimal for the reality/simulation/timeline. This requires intense extra compute in real-time to assess each moment of your life, and the reason you experience it is because there's no priority in that moment to maintain the normal veil between "in-time" (real time subjective to observer) and "out-of-time" (ie as in simulation time) experience. So the rapid processing starves the normal "subjective you" process, and your consciousness gets to "peek through" at the workings of the simulation as it judges whether you dying would be catastrophic. If you "pass", then the simulation ensures your exist for at least a while longer, otherwise, it lets the event take its course.

The subconscious knowledge of this is why we've internalized and re-expressed the "judgement upon death" notion across many religions.

I love this theory. Thank you for sharing.

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)

I have a pet theory that this is why time seems to move faster as you age. Novelty runs out.

As a child, nearly every day is packed with novel stimuli. The number of distinct “imprints” on your memory during this time is extremely high. In other words, you have a higher “memory density” during this period compared to when you’re older and the mind uses these reference points as a proxy for the passage of time.

It follows that you can lead a “longer” life by prioritizing novel experiences over routines.

Since you've thought about it, my impression was more that we're forced to distribute consciousness. Consciousness as in mindfulness. What we aren't conscious in doing becomes reflexive, we put our bodies in autopilot. I think novelty is one way that yes, because it calls forward consciousness, we can expand our mental time frame, sort of like pressing record. I think a good aside here is the concept of the beginner's mind.

In terms of untrained optimization, though, autopilot is prioritized. I think this is pretty well corroborated by Kahneman's chimera in Thinking, Fast and Slow but I think it's less of a metabolic thing than it is an interruption in train of thought.

Perhaps this is derived by the fact the mind can create its own feedback loops, and in the circumstances where you've mastered to the point of intuition and reflexivity some practice, those feedback loops are given precedence because they're more rewarding, and being called to the real world becomes frustrating. At least that's how I'd assemble my own experience in narrative.

It almost seems like time can only be measured when recalling past conscious events.

If you've ever been anesthetized for a medical operation, it really feels like the moment you lose awareness to the moment you wake up again is the same event, except that 15 hours has passed in between.

I've heard people who fall unconscious from head trauma say the same thing. Suddenly they wake up in hospital not knowing what has happened.

That's my conclusion, too. Our sense of time is defined not in seconds but in terms of events, and our perception of the passage of time is defined in proportion to the total number of events we've experienced.

It reminds me of that statement in Starship Troopers (the book): "The death rate's the same for us as for anyone. One person, one death, sooner or later."

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.

> 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

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

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!

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Elves make an excellent podcast that I highly recommend to others.

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.

Maybe hydrodynamic lift is what was meant, but if so, it wasn't well described; it sticks out in memory precisely because he made it sound like the fins contributed on net to reaching orbital energy and I might've yelled at the screen a little bit about that.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

I'll try to find it.

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.

What is QI?

A British tv quiz show.

British Comedy Show, pretty good.

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

Thanks, I didn't know about it

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.

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 ;-)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

For a while I thought exactly that when I was a kid

> 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.

Spiritism has that. When you sleep, your spirit separates from your body, and goes meet other spirits (some of them of other alive people, some of them of people between one life and the next; reincarnation is a central belief of Spiritism); the place where these spirits are could be considered an "alternate reality/parallel universe" of sorts. Dreams are mostly partial recollections of these experiences. For a longer and more detailed explanation, see https://www.febnet.org.br/portal/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/... starting at page 267.

Same, especially given that some of my repeating places are this, at least in dream logic.

There's a 'timeline' where my sister and I live in a different apartment, a timeline where I stayed in/returned to the town I went to college in, one where I didn't go to undergrad after high school and went a lot later, one where my dad's investments saw fruit and we live in a house he left us, one where I stayed in my hometown and work there...

The creepy part is that they're accurate down to things like what cats we have.

Dreams are someone or some entity hacking your mind and stealing information from you so they can help you or the world out afterwards

This is essentially the premise of an H.P. Lovecraft story: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/bws.aspx

It doesn’t revolve around it, but the dream state is considered one of the bardos in Tibetan Buddhism and there are practices around it. It basically consists of practices to become lucid during dreaming in order to practice yoga/meditation within the dream state. [1]

I had no idea it was a thing until once in a dream I was sitting for meditation for whatever reason and became lucid. I decided to keep sitting and practicing in that lucid state. When I woke up later I started doing some research and found out about that Tibetan practice. Maybe someday I’ll meet someone to teach it to me.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

Huh. Interesting.

I've never done yoga in my dreams, but I do relax/meditate once in a while and have techniques for crafting and going to relaxation bubbles in the midst of whatever dream/dream timeline I'm in. It's funny to consider that as a spiritual practice people train for.

> It's funny to consider that as a spiritual practice people train for.

Yeah, I think the thing to note is that in the Tibetan teachings there are various "bardos" [1], three in "ordinary" life and three around the time of death [2]. They also teach that the bardos of death are an opportunity for self-liberation. So if you can't bring awareness/lucidity to the dream state, how likely are you to be able to during the time of death? It's thought of as an opportunity to practice for those moments.

So I think it's easiest to understand the "why" around the dream practice when you put it into that context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol

This existed in the past. Religious leaders (shamans) of different Native American tribes used to go on "vision quests" -- fasting combined with mescaline or other hallucinogenic plants to induce dreams -- sometimes lucid sometimes not. The dreams were interpreted spiritually and visions of the future (or remote viewing of the present).

There is, it's called Buddhism but they tell you to not think about that too much.

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.

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

Well that’s a depressing comment

American humor vs British humor? Just a wild guess ofc.

And/or taking a joke about people in general personal even though the resp. person is just the vehicle for the joke and not the aim?

I found that funny. Probably because I deem my own life anything but remarkable.

Yeah. That was an unusual comment.

A slideshow of all your most upvoted comments

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

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.

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.

Sounds like you were in shock

I had a similar thing happen to me when an elevator I was in started to fall (it had emergency brakes but I didn't know that). I wouldn't describe it as shock, but almost as indifference. I thought "huh, so this is how it happens".

Maybe you weren’t close enough to death?

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

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..

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.)

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.

How did it end?

he died

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

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.

> 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."

I know people who carry cash just so when they are robbed the robber wont get angry

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Why are we evolved to do this?

Probably just in case the thing that would have made us die doesn't actually make us die so we don't fully process the horrifically traumatic thing that caused us to almost die

In case you end up not dying, it makes it memorable enough so that you won't reiterate the action causing you to almost die.

"Oh sh*t, that was traumatic. I'll never eat these gorgeous little berries if they caused that".

On the other hand... "maybe if I take just a bit less, I won't almost die but just have a great trip". Hence, psychedelics.

Stoned Ape Theory?

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-...

Bill Hicks: https://youtu.be/Sb5EjflughU?t=147

I don't think that would apply if you were e.g. a Greek soldier and you were impaled by Persian warriors

Certainly but it would only invalidate my point if I had stated it as universally true.

There’s no way that natural selection selected for this, simply because, well, after you die you won’t have offspring to inherit it.

It is just a side effect of some other mechanism that likely has a use during our lifetime.

What do you think of the other replies?

I read this quickly as "What do you think of the other reptiles?"

When your brain dies, depending on what the issue is, your brain no longer works under normal circumstances.

If your heart stops, oxygen is going down, it could just mean that your brain regularitory features stop working as designed and it's firering more random.

More random / lsd / drugs can give you weird effects. Optical, sensorical etc. illusions.

Well, does it matter? Every ‘we evolved X’ statement is tautological, and is more akin to bringing up the weather.

Until we can run control variables over billions of years…

> 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..."

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).

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

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...

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

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.

There is no proof of any supernatural thing ever.

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 :)

Trying the argument out on such a futile actions as HN comments isn't that telling.

There was a time when a convoluted bio-mechanical system traveled to the Moon and back. Could you do me a favor and re-run that line of thought on that? The Apollo was inevitable and so the biological elements of it should have done... What exactly?...

I'm honestly lost here, I don't ponder about non-materialistic free will anymore.

My favorite is that if there is no free will, then Burger King coupons are somewhere in Maxwell’s equation…

Yes, I do think Burger King coupons are somewhere in Maxwell’s equation. I'd be honestly interested on the Apollo 11 thing though.

Perhaps. Perhaps we will live every moment again and again forever.

But we still don't have any proof of anything supernatural.

Just as we can’t prove most of our lived experience :)

Most things might be true but unprovable.

"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.

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

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.

.22 is also the caliber of the vast majority of infantry weapons in the world.

In 22lr (the piddly little gun most kids learn to shoot on where I love) it’s enough for small game like a squirrel.

In 5.56x45 (NATO) or 5.45x39 (Russia) it’s suitable for larger game like humans or deer.

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.

Did it help you to survive in some way?

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.

I would think that would be a detriment to survival. The brain is fascinating.

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)?

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think this is a correct model. Because gene mutations and second hand effects aren't truly random. For example, prior mutations which confer some benefit and which are therefore selected for can make certain later neutral mutations more likely.

It is the correct model. You can learn more about it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIftg3cM4BM

You misunderstood me. I didn't mean to say that you had proposed the wrong model for neutral evolution. Rather that direct selective pressure and neutral evolution were not the only possible explanations for how a certain gene sequence might become widespread and therefore your model was incomplete as regards the spread of genes.

Again, there are genetic mutations which make certain other mutations more likely. A beneficial mutation which spreads widely can eventually cause a plurality to carry a gene that is neutral or even harmful by giving it a ride on its own selective pressure.

Furthermore, complex systems are susceptible to emergent behavior. For example, is our brain selected by nature to undergo altered consciousnesses in the presence of some chemical substances? Probably. Should we then believe that nature has "selected" our brains to be altered by every psycho-actice drug that exists? Probably not. Some of these are certainly "happy" accidents by which the chemical function of our brain also happens to be impacted or interfered with by some other chemicals, thus inducing a "high".

This gets a little complicated with the fact that many exogenous psychoactive drugs work because they mimic endogenous chemicals - we have receptors for cannabinoids and opioids because we produce cannabinoids and opioids. The effect of the exogenous versions isn't so much an accident as that some plants produce substances that bind to the same receptors, and we're smart enough to have figured that out and learned to cultivate them.

The argument could be made that this serves some vast evolutionary purpose, but then we're back to inventing gods for ourselves again. (And in any case, such a theory would need also to explain why wasps also enjoy getting drunk, this being after all another example of the same behavior. Evo-psych types being as anthropocentric as they are, this never seems to be addressed, but it needs to be if they want the intellectual coherence to which they so anxiously pretend.)

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.

> specific alignment of brain wave patterns that seems a bit too intricate to be purely random.

Spend some time looking and you’ll find everything evolution has crafted contains patterns seemingly too intricate to be purely random. In my opinion this is an artifact of our collective laughably poor understanding of the powers of recursive formulae, especially those that have undergone countless rounds of differential optimizations. In fact, the question “could this have been created by evolution” is eerily similar to the halting problem. Suffice to say, our feeble “human intuition” is of little use against true uncomputability.

Less abstractly, it’s been proposed that by flashing through all your memories you might pick up on some prior experience that lets you recover and go on to have some more kids (or provide for existing kids a bit longer)

> But every trait or behaviour that survives on evolutionary timescales does serve (or did serve, in the case of vestigial features) a purpose.

This is in fact not true. There are "coincidences" of evolutionary biology and if there is not selective pressure to change them, they remain for millions of years.

Plenty of traits are inadvertantly selected for, due to being linked to the traits that actually affect fitness under selected.

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.

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).

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?

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.

  > 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

This process is called 'living.' - Sir Terry

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

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

I'm a time traveler. I can travel into the future 4-16 hours at a time. Depends on the amount of ~~alcho~~ time travel fluid intake.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

For some reason, it didn’t even occur to me that you meant literal indigenous tribes.

Tbh, I was a little put off by the word ‘natives’ because I thought you were referring to non tribal, present day individuals as natives.

But I think there is definitely a missing word for present day indigenous, tribal people who prefer to adhere to their ways rather than accept modern ways of life. “Natives” sounds demeaning to me. “Locals” has a whiff of modernity. Maybe “indigenes” (which is apparently a real word)?

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Indigenes

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

Wh-what? Opium mixed with Tylenol?

Is this GPT3 or a weird troll or what.

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

Okay I don't think you're GPT3 anymore

That's weird though. Don't smoke Tylenol, man.

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.

> lots of anecdata here pointing to this experience as well

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Some near death experiences have a nightmare like structure.

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.

> 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.

It could be that the "infinite love" feeling these religions describe is of a different nature to what we normally know as love, but there is no better word to describe it.

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.

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.

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.

"When he unexpectedly died"?

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

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.

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.)

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

>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?

We were created after all

>Science CONFIRMS

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

tl;dr clickbait

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

Anyone knows if this can also be reproduced by animals?

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.

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.

"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.

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

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