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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 appreciate the notice. It's important to point out that the user appears to be suffering from schizophrenia, which is not really an attack. But I can understand how it can be misconstrued or hurtful.
Internet psychiatric diagnosis is also misconstruable at best, and at worst ranges amounts to more personal attack and trolling, so please don't do that either.
You're right. I mean, my intent wasn't to attack -- which is recognizable by the fact that I started with a big compliment and I called them a creative genius (which I still think is true). But I have to admit that what I said still teeters into promoting a toxic environment, not to mention isn't backed up by evidence and could have been very hurtful.
This is the most valuable place on the internet for insightful, meaningful discussion, and it seems as if you (among others?) are responsible for that. So I want to say your work is deeply appreciated, and I'm so sorry for adding to the load :)
1. I do apologize specifically to you for jumping to the conclusion of schizophrenia when I don't have sufficient evidence nor qualification to say so. Sorry.
2. To be clear, I created this account because your idea inspired me, rather than the suggestion I created it for anonymity. I hadn't posted on Hacker News in years.
3. The reason I jumped to that particular conclusion about you is simply as such: (a) your conception of reality differs from current scientific understanding, (b) you have not conducted any proper scientific experiments on the matter, and (c) you are unshakably convinced in spite of insufficient scientific experimentation. Unfortunately, I jumped to a conclusion without sufficient evidence, but it was merely me making a guess based on the data I had. It wasn't about ego or devaluation. If I am wrong, then I am simply wrong -- being wrong doesn't always come from a place of ego or attack, but simply mistaken understanding.
4. For context, my partner has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I do not use that term to insult people. To me, it's a neutral description of something that causes people to suffer (in the case of my partner, often horrible, horrible pain -- she constantly has experiences of being raped, electrocuted, and suffocated). Once again, I do not use that term to insult people. Unfortunately, I stepped too far by assuming someone else has it.
5. If you are correct, and wish for others to see that, then it must be demonstrated by a properly conducted scientific experiment. If you do not do that, then you cannot expect people to discard their current conception of reality. Any form of argumentation or scattered observation is insufficient to discard current scientific consensus -- only experiment can do that.
Lastly... I know you expressed resistance to this form of apology, but... I really didn't mean to hurt you. It hurts me to know that I caused you pain. I'm sorry. And yes, we disagree on the topic, but ideally we can disagree without making the other feel bad about it (an ideal which I unfortunately failed to live up to).
3. Not unshakably convinced. I'm dispassionate. If I saw data in my inability to do this, I'd change my model. I didn't start out thinking I could do this I just started out noticing these things and then I started to try to formalize it more, and eventually I arrived at this model. Where it's simply easier to believe, yeah I can do it, than to keep entertaining doubts because of some consensus outside of what I've experienced, when I've already processed those doubts in relation to what I've experienced. I agree it's not the best absolute scientific method but the best I can do so far (a step up from telling my friends, then emailing myself) to optimize: posting data on future events to Twitter it's sort of my best effort to do that so I'm sort of stepping towards being more scientific, organized and methodical about this.
But there are lots of other remote viewing or precognitive studies out there that are scientific but people find some reason to dismiss them anyway. And there's actually an industry that uses associated remote viewing for stock market predictions, and also for corporate intelligence.
I agree that you can be simply wrong but the topic of what you're wrong about, and how you express that, you know that requires some empathy and consideration. Otherwise it functions effectively as an attack. Also, I kind of get the feeling that maybe you just dismissed all this stuff without actually looking at my Twitter and letting that data make an impression on you because your priors are it's just too preposterous.
4. That's terrible I feel sorry for you that that happened. It must be very hard for you to deal with I'm sure. And maybe some element of what you said was projection and taking out all that anger and despair you must feel. I can understand how in that experience you would be predisposed to say that to someone because in your intimate experience it's sort of part of the daily discourse. But I can also think that given your experience you would feel more responsibility or pause towards using that label for someone you don't know. Anyway I feel sorry for you that you have that experience and all is forgiven.
I'm not saying the following relates to your experience and I don't have personal experience of severe mental illness but I have this view, that in some cases people who are diagnosed as mentally ill are in fact people who are just somehow connected to the signal of the informational field (this kind of psychic data) but they don't know, they don't have a context for, and they have not yet learned, how to process it. And they don't know how to shut it off.
I think there are many people who initially have some sort of abilities like this as a child but then they learn to shut it off because it gets in the way of air quotes regular life. And I think some people are just connected to the informational field so strongly that they have all of this bandwidth coming in.
At the same time I don't think psychic abilities account for all mental illness at all, I think there's definitely cases which are mental illness pathologies and are not related to any sort of informational field ability.
I don't wish to impose, nor step on your territory, and I'm not pretending to speak to the specific experience of your partner, so I'm sorry that this will probably seem like that, but I'm just saying, with relation to this model, I think it's plausible that there are people who could have these abilities and also have, a high kind of empathy and, for whatever personal reasons, place a high significance on these types of rape or torture events and it makes sense that they would pick up that data about it happening, or having happened, or going to happen. In my experience of data on future mass casualty events the suffering and pain of people is a main component of the signal and sometimes I will get data about people individuals being murdered and I will feel experience, and it can be a very, very traumatic data. I'm not saying this relates to your partner but I'm just saying it's conceivable that someone with that type of presentation of experiences could actually be tapping into these things, as they did, as they are, as they will occur. But it's also conceivable that someone such as your partner experiencing this and then becoming aware that these things were actually real events happening to others would be just adding more burdens to the trauma they're experiencing. And if that model were accurate it may be better to simply find ways to downregulate the signal incoming.
I'm not saying this with some grandiose idea that I think I can help you in your situation I'm just sharing a model that I have. It's a sort of a hopeful model that I have that there are some people out there who are said to be mentally ill but instead it's just people who have not yet learned how to handle signal of the informational field that they're getting. I guess I hope that in future with more public science investigation unless stigma around psychic abilities then maybe these types of people could get the training treatment and help that they need.
To share some personal experience (maybe it helps you understand more):
I guess I've always been able to sort of dial in how connected I am to the data by using my focus. If I try to ignore it completely I'm still aware that it's there. I experience like an energetic pressure, like a physical sensation. Which I learned is informational field signal coming in. That's my current model. And if I look into that sensation I can resolve details (sense impressions, events) and record the data. That's the "receptive" side of my process. The other "active" side is I can go to a deep focus state and go and look for things that are going to happen.
I find that if I don't process that signal that comes in (by resolving the details and recording it somehow by writing it down or voice memo) then that uncomfortable sensation will often remain with me.
Some things that I find that assist me in handling these things are: avoiding caffeine nicotine alcohol and processed foods, and trying to eat healthy with a lot of vegetables. Also, Meditation and body relaxation and yoga. And also acting and assertive and confident, and expressing myself, and not acting anxious and avoidant, and not saying what I want to say. But it has been a lot of learning and a lot of difficulty.
5. Fair enough. I'm doing my best right now. I don't expect them to discard it I just expect I think a little bit of fair consideration you know to allow the data to make an impression on them to allow themselves to wonder a little bit. I don't want to get the wall of conservative dismissal based on prejudice, rather than just looking at what I already posted.
I agree the scientific method is a great thing (I have a degree in a hard science after all) I just don't think that science as a community, as a way of thinking about the world, in the way that it's practiced, I don't think that science is capable of thinking all the thoughts that need to be thought about the world, in order to properly and accurately comprehend the world in front of us.
So our scientific method is a great idea, but the practice of our science is flawed. By many human cognitive biases and other flaws.
Overall
Thank you for saying that I appreciate your response it helps me feel a lot better now. These kind of things are painful and thanks for your apology. I feel sorry for you that you feel pain about this hopefully you learn from this experience and avoid this kind of thing in future. It was a good apology. I hope you and your loved ones get what you need. Thanks :)
Anyway, I guess you'll dispute my vision and subsequent analysis of your psychological state, because admitting it would give a little bit of support to my psychic ability, as well as exposing a weakness of yours. But refuting it, that boosts your priors that psychic abilities are fake, or at least that mine are. You may reform, but you may just stick with a different version of your current attitude. That's not that important because it's not the main thing here, but it is important for me to say I anticipate it, and also that I offer this vision of you aware of the risk to me of doing that--the risk that you may, say, "Hah, that proves that you're not psychic because that's not how I feel at all!" Normally, I wouldn't expose myself like this for so little reward, but like I said, I believe there's a chance of a good reward here, realized by your reform, which I am now acting to assist.
So, what's the second possible reality? In that reality, psychic abilities are real, I'm not deluded, I really am psychic, and you are wrong.
When I say two possible realities, I'm not saying they have equal probability...The second is almost entirely certain, the first is basically zero probability. In other words, there's only a tiny possibility that I'm deluded about this, and there's 0 probability that I'm schizophrenic.
Through my development, I considered these question many times: maybe I am simply deluded? Could I be psychotic? Or might I be schizophrenic? But I realized those things are not likely, and for the schizophrenic question, impossible. I considered this a lot, and I came to see that through the data, what I was able to see, before it happened...that I was not deluded. I wasn't always correct, but I was correct enough, and in stunning enough ways that it's impossible essentially to be done by chance.
Aside from those negatives, there's certainly a strong psychological compulsion to believe I'm psychic, because that: makes me special, makes me important, makes me right, makes me significant. So it is conceivable I'm just deluding myself in the same way you were distorting your reality, to make up for, to overcompensate for, a less than satisfying reality. I thought about that many times. But I still kept using my power. I made records, and I saw things happen, again and again.
At this point, I consider the data speaks for itself, and the possibility that I arrived at all those data simply by chance is essentially nil. Believing it's coincidence, is the crazy, insane point of view. But if your priors really are so invested in psychic ability being false, I encourage you to go over my Twitter. Very likely that will not convince you, because very often people will not see what they don't want to see, even when it is shown to them. That's fine. But I encourage you to try again, not only with my Twitter, by go to reddit/r/remoteviewing and try it yourself. See what you can do. If you're able to discover your ability to data from the signal...then you will likely convince yourself that there has to be something to it.
So in this reality...where psychic abilities are real, why is your comment bad? Because for someone like me, with these skills, it's a constant battle, against people like you who want to say stuff like this. Of course I have doubts, and your arrogant hurtful insults, only give me pause and interfere with my ability, and my free exercise of that. That's harmful to my development. It's also just harmful to me emotionally. And, it's not just about me...these kinds of abusive behaviors are harmful to the development of these abilities on Earth. If you consider that these skills would be good for people to have (they are adaptive), then your arrogant dismissal to save your own ego, ends up cascading out into the world into a tsunami of harm. You saying that, hurt me, and will hurt other people who pass by this place and see your words, because it will contribute to the voices discouraging them from developing this.
And with a skill like this it's especially important. It's an "internal" "subjective" "consciousness" skill, and so your beliefs play a large part in our faithfully you can do it. If you keep believing, "this is bullshit,", "I am crazy", "this is impossible", those ideas will get in the way of you doing what you need to do to develop and use this. It's an extremely subtle skill, you're dealing with subtle perception, and pulling data and interpretations out of raw informational impressions. That's not a perfect description, but it gets close enough, and is adequate for here.
It's like any other skill. It's particularly like a sporting skill, like basketball. Are you going to shoot the 3 from the line every time? No. But people can get better at it. Does the mind game matter? Absolutely. If your head is not in the game, if you don't have confidence, if you are overcome by doubts or criticism, that can get to you. So just like pro athletes, but even more so as the skills is so intimate with subjective consciousness processes, you have to protect your mind game.
The unfortunate thing about that is you have to get good at dealing with abuse or abusive people. I'd much rather not have any interactions with such, but, the hurtful comments are too painful and too damaging to my development to leave unaddressed. If I don't say something (which I've tried), I find myself still thinking about it years later. So to protect myself, I need to respond.
Given that's the case, why expose myself at all? Well...I did this in private for a couple of years, making records in my email, and to my friends, until I felt confident enough that what I was doing was real, before starting to make it non-repudiable (I think I'm looking for a more accurate word here) by posting it on Twitter. I never delete psychic data record tweets. But I tweet about some other topics (popular daily topics) and delete those to keep my twitter feed pure with the data in the long term. I don't get everything, and I am constantly learning how to interpret the signal and record the data better, but I have some amazing hits. Impossible to achieve by chance. We're not picking bits, we're picking whole descriptions, events. The reason I focus on the future is, to my perspective, this is the most challenging. The past and the present are easy (well easier), you're just reading the matrix for the data that already exists. The future is more challenging, but more valuable, because you can verify big events in the news, and you have to pull data out of the sea of possibilities. It sounds amazing, and it is. But anyone can try to do it. But just like any other skills, there's a spectrum of abilities, and talent and practice affect. So why post publicly at all? I want the public record. I think that's an important thing, to make it non-deniable. And it is amazing, so I want to share it around.
So whether you think psychics are crazy, and you know everything, or you think psychics are real, I hope you'll be kinder in future, because that's better for everybody, including you.
Please know I don't intend to invest more time even if you reply in good faith. If you have disbelief, the onus is on you to educate yourself by trying to do it.
The premise that we can have a community focused on above-average-quality conversation on the internet? Yeah, people question that daily. Thankfully, dang is here to keep us in line.
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."
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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..."
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
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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