There's an awful lot of uncritical supposition in this article. Sure, the brain MAY be recalling all the best moments of your life before you die, but there's zero evidence that that's what those recordings mean, aside from whimsy and hopefulness. It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream, and that, to me, sounds a lot more likely.
I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.
Yeah, I didn't see any evidence in that article that it was positive - for all we know it it's the brain serving up a collection of every time you told the waiter "you too" right after they said "enjoy your meal".
I don't mind it because it's not masquerading as anything but supposition. Besides, this is the pop-sci summary of the actual source paper. If it's too pop-sci-ish for you, just read the actual source paper:
The linked paper is, of course, not necessarily super valuable from a scientific perspective. After all, n=1 and we're talking about somebody with traumatic brain injuries who has been administrated lots of psychoactive drugs. Not a typical healthy brain. But, I found it fascinating. There is some speculation but I would call it reasoned and restrained.
I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc....
"Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events. "
Perhaps not even memory access, but more like the neuron activation thresholds change when oxygen, ions, etc quit flowing to them, causing random firing.
To me the 'and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal' is the key bit of uncritical supposition. As if our brains have evolved/were created to ease the transition to death. I don't know if the actual study concluded this, or if it was added as editorial.
"It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream"
Is it established that dreaming is near-random memory access? I thought the whole process of dreaming is quite far from being understood, so wouldn't it be a stretch to call it near-random, when in reality there might be pattern, but just one we do not understand yet?
Frontiers is a predatory open access publisher, and your first assumption should always be that anything in a Frontiers journal is pay-for-play bollocks.
This corresponds with what I've read previously about brain activity following clinical death. What appears to be the case is that the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops and a last breath is taken. So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you. And it is comforting to know that during that moment, the brain of the deceased might just be reliving all the greatest moments of that individual's life.
> the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops
I had a sudden cardiac arrest (Ventricular Fibrillation). I felt dizzy and oriented for a few seconds (5?) after my heart stopped pumping blood and then I passed out. There was no life-flashing-before-my-eyes, no tunnels of light, just sudden dizziness and disorientation and then nothing. The next thing I remember was coming round in hospital.
> So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you.
Just because there is brain activity doesn't mean there is consciousness. A 10 week old fetus has brain activity. But it is not anything we'd call conscious. If your heart stops or you've stopped breathing, then it's highly unlikely you are conscious. But if it helps one cope with a loved one's death, perhaps there is no harm in letting them believe the deceased could hear your final goodbyes.
The brain might very well be in a weird state at that moment. In that case, it would be best if it is unconscious. Comfort is not high on nature's agenda.
I wonder if there’s truth to the reports of people after being Guillotined still being able to blink and make facial expressions even though their head has just been severed.
I though everyone knew this? The brain wouldn't just immediately stop working because a heart stopped pumping, there would be some sort of delay effect there.
this assumes that death is binary: you're either dead or not. this is not how things work. you don't know the precise time duration and what happens unless you are there to experience it.
i think the best time to say goodbye and i love you is at any point in time
Unsure, but dead Atlantic salmon brains have been rigorously studied
Not exactly connected to the discussion, but still worth noting that brain activity sensing can be difficult! (And it also makes me smile, thinking about a fishmonger's prized frozen fish undergoing a brain scan).
I have that inner emotion, when thinking about death. It makes me very uneasy. When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like? Pure black and emptyness? I then comfort myself into thinking, in the end it comes down to energy. Like being part of that endless stream of energy that became matter and probably will return to energy somewhere in infinty. Or do we maybe just restart. All this is completely mind boggling.
Then again how did it all start? Causality is completely broken, when it comes to these things.
This makes me think of an interesting theory I've been thinking of:
Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".
Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.
“Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Or replaying their greatest embarrassments. That's what my brain will be doing -- why change the habit of a lifetime?
Something beautiful about the brain running "Beauty, Awe, and Wonder" one last time before the final SIGTERM is sent. If there is a Big Neuroscientist in the Sky, he clearly has some affection for us.
This is a big factor in my insomnia. Not necessarily the fear that I'll die in my sleep (God willing, that's my preference in old age) but the realization that every night, I'm getting a little more and more acquainted with oblivion. Knowing that you and everyone else here is in the same boat helps a lot. Maybe it's trite, and silly, but the phrase "We're all in this together" brings me a little bit of comfort, a tiny slice of what I imagine the spiritual feel in greater quantities.
As I get older I suspect more and more that humans are not adapted for atheism. Even us hard atheists tell each other stories of chemicals and stuff and cosmos and infinity. I have an ongoing conversation with my wife on whether we'll raise our future children Catholic or not. I think we might. The lure of those stories, the grandiosity of those narratives, the imagery and ritual... Those are just buttons that I don't know if an atheistic upbringing could press. I'm not saying it's not possible... Would a reverential trip to the Grand Canyon, a late night summer trip to Amboyd Crater, fulfill the need for awe that a child has as she's growing up? If I could will it I would have her completely skip the existential terror that I've contended with throughout my life, but of course, she would be her own person and her own mind, regardless of my plans.
I've had sleep paralysis a few times in my life. The last time was 15 years ago, and it felt like something I could get used to now that I know what it is. It was a really interesting sensory hallucination.
Am I crazy, or is it something you can get used to, like practicing lucid dreams?
> “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
They're just theorizing here. Generally that would be something to say to console someone, just like "They're in a better place". It could be just as likely that if the person had strong memories of traumatic experiences, they could be remembering them.
One my fears is that as I am dying my brain will get stuck in a subjective time loop, in essence, the last 30 seconds will subjectively stretch out to a thousand years... but with only a handful of repeating feelings and sensations. What if due to other physical discomfort, your memories replayed are those of regret or other unpleasant sensations? (similar to a "bad trip").
I am afraid that the last few minutes of life will be like a confusing and disoriented nightmare. That has always seemed to me to be the most likely scenario as your brain is shutting down.
> discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation
There are other possibilities besides memory recall. It sounds a little bit like falling asleep, where there might be some thoughts, some stillness (meditation) and some dreaming.
Since the birth of our son, I have been thinking about death a lot. He takes comfort when he is in my wife's hug and sometimes refuses to sleep if she is not around. I'm sure he remembers nothing about this when he grows up (< 2 yr now). But then I wonder, maybe many years later, when he passes away, surely this replay of memory might give him the last comfort?
Anyway, as a (not 100%) materialist, I feel uneasy when I think about death. The older I am the more uneasy I feel. Of course there is no way to cheat death, but I'm looking forward to training myself to accept the inevitable before it is too late.
Or maybe there IS life after death, or certain kind of existence. I'm also looking forward to that too.
Thanks, I was just about to post it (I remembered it as "Project Brainstorm", but as you state it's actually just called "Brainstorm"). One of the most remarkable movies I've ever seen.
> “Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,” Zemmar speculated.
I wonder what the adaptive benefits of near-death flashbacks are. Perhaps as a way to give last-ditch motivation.
We have plenty of accounts of what it's like to have a heart stop. Thank defibrillators for that. Of course, the whole ordeal may not be accurately committed to memory.
It doesn't have to have adaptive benefits. The critical path is molded by natural selection but the rest grows wild, mutating as it pleases until it either helps or hinders gene replication.
For example, if humans exploded like a bomb when we died the way some insects do to protect their colony, that might be selected for or against by evolution. Or if somehow eating the deceased's heart or brain actually transferred their strength or memories to the consumer, as some cultures believed. But no, death by old age just doesn't interest evolution.
There's an assumption that the brain knows that its support structure, aka the body, has stopped functioning in a permanent sense.
I can see how brains could evolve to do status checks and respond to survivable events. But, I don't see how it could evolve to have a different response to non-survivable events.
What I'm getting at is, do folks who survive report that they had a nice experience? If not, how did brains get a different mechanism for/response to not-survivable experiences?
I'm very skeptical of this, mostly because there's no logical reason for this to exist. Everything in our behavior and bodies has a purpose, for the most part pure survival or reproduction. There's no use for replaying memories of one's "best moments" in life.
More likely, these are random accesses of vivid memories (the ones that have been strongly imprinted on the brain) and these could be both happy or sad ones.
My mother's family has a history of seeing deceased relatives when they're about to die. It has become such tradition that some have even reported to see the dead waving and calling them to the light, but turns out they weren't at risk of death.
Autosuggestion is a powerful phenomenon. They're convinced they'll see the welcome party, and they will if their death is not sudden.
If you were concerned about the ethics of the situation like I was, then here is an excerpt from the paper itself that you might find reassuring:
"After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the “Do-Not-
Resiscitate[sic!] (DNR)” status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."
Via news.ycombinator.com: Actual title of the post is "A replay of life: What happens in our brain when we die?" -- please respect the submission rules...
Via reddit.com: How vile of the liberulz to mis-characterize Trump's new social network like that -- please don't do that here...
[Edit: and yes, downvoted within 2 minutes... How. Surprising]
[+] [-] DanHulton|4 years ago|reply
I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnBooty|4 years ago|reply
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.8135...
The linked paper is, of course, not necessarily super valuable from a scientific perspective. After all, n=1 and we're talking about somebody with traumatic brain injuries who has been administrated lots of psychoactive drugs. Not a typical healthy brain. But, I found it fascinating. There is some speculation but I would call it reasoned and restrained.
[+] [-] jwuphysics|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h0l0cube|4 years ago|reply
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2014/10/07-worlds-largest...
"Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events. "
[+] [-] imglorp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stubish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutzlibu|4 years ago|reply
Is it established that dreaming is near-random memory access? I thought the whole process of dreaming is quite far from being understood, so wouldn't it be a stretch to call it near-random, when in reality there might be pattern, but just one we do not understand yet?
[+] [-] davidgerard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DonCarlitos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KineticLensman|4 years ago|reply
I had a sudden cardiac arrest (Ventricular Fibrillation). I felt dizzy and oriented for a few seconds (5?) after my heart stopped pumping blood and then I passed out. There was no life-flashing-before-my-eyes, no tunnels of light, just sudden dizziness and disorientation and then nothing. The next thing I remember was coming round in hospital.
[+] [-] tmikaeld|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiskit|4 years ago|reply
Just because there is brain activity doesn't mean there is consciousness. A 10 week old fetus has brain activity. But it is not anything we'd call conscious. If your heart stops or you've stopped breathing, then it's highly unlikely you are conscious. But if it helps one cope with a loved one's death, perhaps there is no harm in letting them believe the deceased could hear your final goodbyes.
[+] [-] tgv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damontal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertywert_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgitsabird|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirceal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
Edit: liars liars pants on fire. It has been done before.
https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much...
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
Not exactly connected to the discussion, but still worth noting that brain activity sensing can be difficult! (And it also makes me smile, thinking about a fishmonger's prized frozen fish undergoing a brain scan).
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
[+] [-] schodi|4 years ago|reply
Then again how did it all start? Causality is completely broken, when it comes to these things.
[+] [-] polishdude20|4 years ago|reply
Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".
Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.
Must be a wild ride.
[+] [-] unfocussed_mike|4 years ago|reply
Or replaying their greatest embarrassments. That's what my brain will be doing -- why change the habit of a lifetime?
[+] [-] ipnon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kowlo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nefitty|4 years ago|reply
As I get older I suspect more and more that humans are not adapted for atheism. Even us hard atheists tell each other stories of chemicals and stuff and cosmos and infinity. I have an ongoing conversation with my wife on whether we'll raise our future children Catholic or not. I think we might. The lure of those stories, the grandiosity of those narratives, the imagery and ritual... Those are just buttons that I don't know if an atheistic upbringing could press. I'm not saying it's not possible... Would a reverential trip to the Grand Canyon, a late night summer trip to Amboyd Crater, fulfill the need for awe that a child has as she's growing up? If I could will it I would have her completely skip the existential terror that I've contended with throughout my life, but of course, she would be her own person and her own mind, regardless of my plans.
[+] [-] jcadam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|4 years ago|reply
Am I crazy, or is it something you can get used to, like practicing lucid dreams?
[+] [-] richm31415|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsmitty5000|4 years ago|reply
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkural|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatchnyc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awb|4 years ago|reply
There are other possibilities besides memory recall. It sounds a little bit like falling asleep, where there might be some thoughts, some stillness (meditation) and some dreaming.
[+] [-] wrycoder|4 years ago|reply
Some people are optimists.
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0315|4 years ago|reply
Anyway, as a (not 100%) materialist, I feel uneasy when I think about death. The older I am the more uneasy I feel. Of course there is no way to cheat death, but I'm looking forward to training myself to accept the inevitable before it is too late.
Or maybe there IS life after death, or certain kind of existence. I'm also looking forward to that too.
[+] [-] ge96|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
[+] [-] progman32|4 years ago|reply
I wonder what the adaptive benefits of near-death flashbacks are. Perhaps as a way to give last-ditch motivation.
We have plenty of accounts of what it's like to have a heart stop. Thank defibrillators for that. Of course, the whole ordeal may not be accurately committed to memory.
[+] [-] mLuby|4 years ago|reply
For example, if humans exploded like a bomb when we died the way some insects do to protect their colony, that might be selected for or against by evolution. Or if somehow eating the deceased's heart or brain actually transferred their strength or memories to the consumer, as some cultures believed. But no, death by old age just doesn't interest evolution.
[+] [-] anamax|4 years ago|reply
I can see how brains could evolve to do status checks and respond to survivable events. But, I don't see how it could evolve to have a different response to non-survivable events.
What I'm getting at is, do folks who survive report that they had a nice experience? If not, how did brains get a different mechanism for/response to not-survivable experiences?
[+] [-] john_moscow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UltraViolence|4 years ago|reply
More likely, these are random accesses of vivid memories (the ones that have been strongly imprinted on the brain) and these could be both happy or sad ones.
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|4 years ago|reply
Autosuggestion is a powerful phenomenon. They're convinced they'll see the welcome party, and they will if their death is not sudden.
[+] [-] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
"After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the “Do-Not- Resiscitate[sic!] (DNR)” status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."
[+] [-] csee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andygroundwater|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewakalix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdb31|4 years ago|reply
Via reddit.com: How vile of the liberulz to mis-characterize Trump's new social network like that -- please don't do that here...
[Edit: and yes, downvoted within 2 minutes... How. Surprising]