When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.
Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.
IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.
It's possible that they do it because they learned pathological systems of behaviour from pathological family/social experiences, but even if fighting back against them is also shitty, it beats enabling them to keep doing it (especially to you)
What you may be thinking of is research showing that when kids get to know each other, the ones who will become socially dominant tend to be aggressive early. But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer. With further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance.
The most common scenario for continued aggression is someone near the social bottom, who is attempting to reinforce that there is someone who is still firmly below them.
This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research.
Closely related, corporal punishment results in kids who are more likely to try to get their way through violence. Though they'll also take care not to be caught doing so. This is one of the big reasons why psychologists argue against using corporal punishment.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
The exact same can be said for good ole Adi. And many of his ilk currently alive.
What you're saying isn't a straightforward universal truth. There's no one right answer. Some of the time, what you're saying is very true. Other times it's very much not. GP's reaction as such isn't "knee-jerk". The equation doesn't suddenly change the second the "evildoer" in question turns 18, or 21.
I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away.
However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.
I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.
For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing.
I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.
Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
My first time I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backwards from 100. I assumed the process would take 30 to 60 seconds. I don't think I even hit 97..
Had the same experience, what scared the crap out of me is that feeling of not even knowing you're out is how some people spend their last moment.
Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while
Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually.
And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking.
The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma.
Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep.
Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement.
Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
Do you know how that usually applies to people with addiction problems who elect not to receive anesthesia? Do they generally receive everything except the pain killers?
Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.
I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.
I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.
Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years.
I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal.
Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up.
As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.
I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.
It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”
They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.
“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”
(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)
Given that we don't really have a precise definition of "alive", it should not be surprising that we are unable to tell the precise moment a person dies.
I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.
I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I don’t see any reason why this would have to be an uncomfortable experience. A study with this kind of potential could easily get funding to relocate necessary equipment to a home or chosen location (assuming the participant is able to die outside hospital), and once the equipment is set up and running it’s unlikely that operators would even need to be present.
Why do people write wills? Why do people leave messages for their loved ones before they die? Why do people donate organs?
Because they care about leaving behind an impact after they die. I don't think it would be for everyone, but there surely be some people who would want to do this.
Given I’m going to die anyway, I’d readily do it. How else will we increase our understanding of the brain’s experience of dying? And it seems that even beyond the mere understanding, we might be able to prepare for and manage short-term care of imminent organ donors as just one concrete case.
Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.
What a weird way of phrasing that.
The whole point of ethics in multiple disciplines is to try and study the principles of humanity in the society we've formed. The areas of philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion are filled with centuries of discussions trying to argue and explain a lot of these matters.
But the philosopher of the Internet of today, instead of curiosity of reasoning and arguing for what should change in deontology, and why; sums it up as "ethicists forbid...".
I'd really like to understand your views better on what should change and why...
Especially when there's plenty of ignoring of ethics in today's world!
The centuries of ethics discussions have nothing to do with the current institutions that gatekeep science and health with worries and trivia, any more than philosophers of nature are responsible for enviromentalists not letting us build housing. I'm entirely referring to anti-growth bureaucrats. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/highlights-from-the-co...
Ethicists seem worse for the world than actually unethical people because they bind the majority of good people from progressing, which is what gets us out ahead of our baser natures.
Without ethics, other motivations inevitably end up undermining any good intentions an experimenter may have. Ethics are the "laws" of science that constrain us for the sake of all. Your opinions here reflect a Libertarian bent, I bet.
But as the person had epilepsy, which happens as a result of "abnormal electrical brain activity", I wonder how general those results are. I'm surprised this hasn't been done on a 'healthy' patient
If your perception of time is distorted in those last moments, perhaps you live another thousand or million years in what was your life in what was only a few seconds for the people watching you die. After this thousand or however many years you experienced, you are ready for the experience to be over.
Now what happens to people who are shot directly in the head with a gun? Or have their brain otherwise abruptly massively damaged.
Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)
The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).
I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.
Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.
Hmm is it worth the read?
edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of
Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for
worthwhile reading
I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.
What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about?
If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience.
However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..
I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).
But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.
And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.
Finding the article is a good case for AI chats, particularly ones with the direct links from the web in the answer. I tried perplexity and google ai mode, both failed
When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.
I'm sorry that happened to you. That's so horrible. Wanna make me beat up bullies, man. Got damn bullies.
Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.
IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.
It's possible that they do it because they learned pathological systems of behaviour from pathological family/social experiences, but even if fighting back against them is also shitty, it beats enabling them to keep doing it (especially to you)
No, that is absolutely not a misconception, and is backed by peer reviewed research such as https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/why-stigmatized-ado....
What you may be thinking of is research showing that when kids get to know each other, the ones who will become socially dominant tend to be aggressive early. But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer. With further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance.
The most common scenario for continued aggression is someone near the social bottom, who is attempting to reinforce that there is someone who is still firmly below them.
Social mean girl bullies maybe. A guy who chokes a 15 yr old til they lose consciousness is not trying to climb the social ladder though
> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line
oh you need to convince them that more beatings would be forthcoming if they step out of line again.
This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research.
Closely related, corporal punishment results in kids who are more likely to try to get their way through violence. Though they'll also take care not to be caught doing so. This is one of the big reasons why psychologists argue against using corporal punishment.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
The exact same can be said for good ole Adi. And many of his ilk currently alive.
What you're saying isn't a straightforward universal truth. There's no one right answer. Some of the time, what you're saying is very true. Other times it's very much not. GP's reaction as such isn't "knee-jerk". The equation doesn't suddenly change the second the "evildoer" in question turns 18, or 21.
My brother picked me up by the neck once. I still have nightmares about it. Kids are so insanely cruel.
I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away.
However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.
I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.
For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing.
I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.
Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
My first time I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backwards from 100. I assumed the process would take 30 to 60 seconds. I don't think I even hit 97..
Had the same experience, what scared the crap out of me is that feeling of not even knowing you're out is how some people spend their last moment.
Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while
Honestly it doesn’t sound too bad to me. Just blinking out of existence. No pain, no regret. So what’s there to be scared of?
Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually.
And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking.
The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma.
Is that accurate?
No, it's just a creepypasta.
Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep.
Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement.
Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
Do you know how that usually applies to people with addiction problems who elect not to receive anesthesia? Do they generally receive everything except the pain killers?
No. As an aside, when you are younger they may elect to put you into a twilight level of sedation.
And that is how I saw the inside of my own beating heart at 10 while I was tied down and essentially naked in front of like 10+ adults.
Oh, and the contrast dye momentarily made me feel like I was being burnt alive from the inside out.
My wife had this done when doing a biopsy, IIRC, and it scarred here / gave her PTSD for years..
She now insists on full sedation.
Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
I had similar expirience. Time slowed down like 500x, and I had dream like visions and flashbacks - all within 1,2 seconds before hitting the ground.
From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.
I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.
I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.
"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.
I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.
10 times? Wow.. That seems like a lot.. AFAIK, even once is indication of potentially serious trauma.
Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years.
I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal.
Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
So is it similar to dreaming?
Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?
Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up.
As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.
I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
Very interesting thanks for sharing. And also a bit scary. It seems like you have found ways to live with this condition.
I’ve had similar experiences.
In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.
It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
I got knocked off my bike about 20 years ago and was unconcious long enough that an ambulance had arrived.
I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.
huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this
FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”
They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.
Modern medicine definitely doesn’t use “has no heartbeat == is dead”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_death#Medical_declaratio... adds “irreversible” to the definition:
“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”
(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)
Also the question is incorrect. There isn't an exact time when someone dies.
Given that we don't really have a precise definition of "alive", it should not be surprising that we are unable to tell the precise moment a person dies.
Miracle Max gave us a clear definition if I recall, you die when you are "all dead", as long as you are mostly dead, you are slightly alive...
I'll let myself out now.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/ibpdNqrtar0
I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.
I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.
Must be a wild experience to be hooked up to a bunch of test machines while dying on schedule.
I went out to a loop choke once in BJJ. I wasn’t out long, but I wondered after if that’s what death is like - a flash of thought and that’s it.
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
https://youtu.be/ET71mabgEuM
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I don’t see any reason why this would have to be an uncomfortable experience. A study with this kind of potential could easily get funding to relocate necessary equipment to a home or chosen location (assuming the participant is able to die outside hospital), and once the equipment is set up and running it’s unlikely that operators would even need to be present.
Why do people write wills? Why do people leave messages for their loved ones before they die? Why do people donate organs?
Because they care about leaving behind an impact after they die. I don't think it would be for everyone, but there surely be some people who would want to do this.
I don’t think most people have the perspective that you do.
Given I’m going to die anyway, I’d readily do it. How else will we increase our understanding of the brain’s experience of dying? And it seems that even beyond the mere understanding, we might be able to prepare for and manage short-term care of imminent organ donors as just one concrete case.
> Science can fuck off
not all of it, presumably, if you want to express your distaste on the magical glass slab and you want pain killers on your way out.
"Science can fuck off" - reminded me of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. I a good way :)
Lmao. "After you're dead, let us know how it went."
This reminds me about the movie "Flatliners"[0] in my need-to-watch queue. Maybe this weekend.
[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/?ref_=fn_t_2
Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.
What a weird way of phrasing that. The whole point of ethics in multiple disciplines is to try and study the principles of humanity in the society we've formed. The areas of philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion are filled with centuries of discussions trying to argue and explain a lot of these matters.
But the philosopher of the Internet of today, instead of curiosity of reasoning and arguing for what should change in deontology, and why; sums it up as "ethicists forbid...".
I'd really like to understand your views better on what should change and why...
Especially when there's plenty of ignoring of ethics in today's world!
The centuries of ethics discussions have nothing to do with the current institutions that gatekeep science and health with worries and trivia, any more than philosophers of nature are responsible for enviromentalists not letting us build housing. I'm entirely referring to anti-growth bureaucrats. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/highlights-from-the-co...
Ethicists seem worse for the world than actually unethical people because they bind the majority of good people from progressing, which is what gets us out ahead of our baser natures.
Without ethics, other motivations inevitably end up undermining any good intentions an experimenter may have. Ethics are the "laws" of science that constrain us for the sake of all. Your opinions here reflect a Libertarian bent, I bet.
But as the person had epilepsy, which happens as a result of "abnormal electrical brain activity", I wonder how general those results are. I'm surprised this hasn't been done on a 'healthy' patient
If your perception of time is distorted in those last moments, perhaps you live another thousand or million years in what was your life in what was only a few seconds for the people watching you die. After this thousand or however many years you experienced, you are ready for the experience to be over.
Now what happens to people who are shot directly in the head with a gun? Or have their brain otherwise abruptly massively damaged.
This is giving me "Brainstorm" vibes.
If you haven't watched the movie, now would be a good time.
Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)
The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).
Her death was even more mysterious https://people.com/natalie-wood-death-legacy-what-to-know-86...
Thanks for sharing this gem.
Can't think of a way that brains doing this is adaptive in an evolutionary sense.
Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.
I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.
Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.
> they areare mystical or part of their mental work.
In ancient Greece, epilepsy was called the "holy disease" and it was believed that gods speak through the patient during a seizure.
Without spoiling too much, this is a major theme in Dan Brown's latest novel 'the secret of secrets'.
Hmm is it worth the read? edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for worthwhile reading
I added it to my reading list!
Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes Epilepsy and God - Part 1
https://youtu.be/qIiIsDIkDtg?si=bIjpz5mWHEbN_NDI
what was it like for you
I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.
I presume your colleague was dead for more than 7-8 minutes... That was gallant of you.
A dataset of one (1), eh? And epileptic to boot.
It always starts with 1 :)
What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about? If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience. However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..
Interesting. I am no expert but this might be related to photonic luminiscent emission while on stress as it happens with almost every living being.
You mean light? How is this related to regular emission of light?
imagine your life is flashing before your eyes and you're remembering reading this comment
Thanks a lot, goopypoop, I hate it.
It is the brain uploading it's memories to the afterlife.
I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).
But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.
And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.
Wouldn't your life flash before your eyes on every new bad event then? Like your first cut?
I guess the example I gave was a bit dumb.
I always figured it's the brain spasming wildly and out of sync which will cause experiences encoded to those patterns or neurons.
A good example of what we call a "just so" theory.
Finding the article is a good case for AI chats, particularly ones with the direct links from the web in the answer. I tried perplexity and google ai mode, both failed
Could you share the link to that article?
Sorry, but it is something I read a while back. If I find it again and don't forget, I will share.
Maybe you just need the proper threat? :-)