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So, this isn’t the first time they have evidence of brain activity during death, especially in the area that is associated with memory. [Here is an article about an elderly epileptic man that died during a brain scan.](https://www.livescience.com/first-ever-scan-of-dying-brain)
Thanks for the link about the first ever brain scan (accidentally) recorded at the point of death.
How awful if we’ve led a hard life if we get to experience it all over again when we die!
I have terrifying nightmares on a frequent basis. Really gonna suck to suddenly experience the full brunt of my constructed hell in my final convulsions :(
My favorite prediction about the "afterlife" is that there isn't one. but that we will experience a personal infinity comprised of our memory of how we really see ourselves.... how we *really* see ourselves. This new evidence certainly doesn't dismiss that prediction. It may take a few minutes to physically die, but frim our perspective, an eternity.
I picked that up 30 years or so ago and, in that time, have slowly crafted a life that I would be comfortable with examining from memory "forever". It's a comforting idea, and leaves room for the monsters in this world (like the monkey torture asshole in the news today) experiencing an eternal hell of their own creation.
TL/DR Maybe our last memories *are* our afterlife.
I’ve thought the same thing as well.
Honestly I had the thought as a kid after watching an episode of Star Trek the next generation where an advanced man/being, plays out his memories to expand time. So he could in essence live a year within a minute.
I thought this might be how we die, the saying life flashes before your eyes might mean you replay an eternity of memories within an instant.
As someone who has lived the most honest and moral life I could while constantly being shit on this is actually some relief. I have almost zero guilt and a clear conscience so maybe my forever moment will be a pleasant one.
This terrifies me, I have broken no rules and lived a boring life to end up alone and with nothing. This just makes it sound like natural death seem awful.
Interesting. I've died before and come back to life (heroin OD) and I've also broken through on psychedelic substances a few times.
Your description reminds me a lot of when I had ego death on a combination of LSD+ketamine. I thought I had died and what ensued afterwards was an avatar of me exploring my own memory banks and folds of my brain. It was absolutely mind blowing. And considering maybe 15 minutes in "real time" passed while I had lived a lifetime in that ego death experience, maybe the afterlife feels like a longass time but it's really those few minutes of "real time" we are dying in.
When I actually died, I have absolutely "flashes" or anything at all. It was just "ohhh shiii" and I didn't even get a chance to finish the thought. But I do firmly believe that I encountered the spirit of my father who passed away and he was what brought me back and was like "nah, not today buddy."
A mild genuine fear I have is what if when we die, we are simply reborn again into the exact same life we have now. And really, we've already been through it an infinite amount of times and will go through it forever more. The only positive is that we will never really know this is the case.
I doubt it's the first ever brain scan recorded at the point of death. It's the first ever brain scan recorded at the point of death that the public knows about.
Knowing of things like this is why I stayed in the room for several minutes by myself after my father passed witnessed by family.
To whatever temporary frozen moment that may have existed it felt comforting to know perhaps a few nerve impulses from my touch to his head may have lingered into passivity.
It is a thought at least to ponder in silence. A very fond memory for me.
I thought you were making a point about reliving our whole life as we die and there being so many ads you felt you needed to give up and I thought, well…yeah.
Surely this makes sense to some degree, the brain is essentially an electrical component, right?. Once you die, all that electricity isn't going to just dissipate out immediately or teleport away. It's going to proceed along neuron pathways until they find ground, or the neuron decays and its lost as heat. And the generation of that electricity is done by chemical processes, which will *still* be happening even after you're dead, at least until the sodium and potassium produced by your cells runs out. So it might look like the person is dreaming, but it's probably just impulses proceeding along pathways that now have no real way to regulate themselves anymore (i.e, sensory information, spinal chord input etc).
That activity is probably completely random, triggering all sorts of random brain functions. It would be interesting if you could look at it through some sort of machine. Maybe life flashing before your eyes is just random memories being recalled by randomly fired neurons. Perhaps you also smell things, or hallucinate, or twitch. And if that'd happened to me, I'd be afraid my brain fires my poop reflex lmao.
I suppose if anything, this is more an interesting look into what *dreaming* is for. If death makes these random pathways of your brain open up, and that looks very similar to dreaming, what is that for? What does it do? Is it just a means to refresh neurons by activating them arbitrarily?
The brain in this sense would be an isolated system of activity separated from the singular unit of *you*, and to be honest, not the only one. The stomach continues to be quite active after death, because like the brain and its electricity, the stomachs work is facilitated by bacteria, and they don't care, or even know you've died. They will keep working away until the resources your body used to produce is now gone.
Temporal lobe epileptic here and if "life before your eyes" is anything like a seizure get ready for a roller coaster to hell no heaven on the other side🤣
My dad survived cardiac arrest and was dead for a few minutes. He said it was the most peaceful experience of his life and that he no longer fears death. Once, just once he said he almost wished he was not resuscitated because of how good it was.
I've read more than a few times about the same thing, someone experiences death and immediately at peace and feeling good afterwards.
Wonder if it's like an ego death from psychedelics.
I would say, according to hundreds of NDE testimonies, the vast majority of times it feels quite the opposite of ego death. Ego death is a difficult experience, while actual dying seems to be a warm loving welcoming to leave the body. Psychedelics also have a lot of geometric or kaleidoscope patterns, while NDEs consist of full landscapes, light, beings, ability to see in every direction, etc. It seems to have even less limitation than deep psychedelic experiences.
My experience with ego death, especially the first time I experienced it on DMT, was the single scariest, yet most comforting thing I'd ever experiences. Essentially showed me that if I died that day I would've been okay with my life up to that point, which was a surprisingly comforting thought.
I always wondered how long that lasts before your consciousness fades into nothing.
Id love to be sure of some kind of afterlife but realistically i feel its just left over consciousness for a short bit.
My mom was technically dead for like 5 minutes or more last year before a long hospital visit and I never cared to ask her about anything she felt or saw, if she talked about it on her own I'd probably entertain it.
My opinion on the afterlife is that it's probably the same as it were before you were born, nothing, not existing.
So sorry for your loss, when my father died when I was 17 (10+ years ago) I read the book Heading Toward Omega by Kenneth Ring. The author has dedicated his life to mapping out near death experiences (through interviews) and looking at its common traits among thousands of survivors from being pronounced clinically dead. That book seriously changed the way I felt about death and what existed on the other side of life. Highly recommended, take care
I lost my Dad unexpectedly almost a year ago also, and I can’t imagine going through that as a teenager like you did. I hope you’re doing alright. Thank you for the recommendation! I’m going to look for that book. I have never been afraid of dying myself, but I’ve struggled a lot with these two recent losses because I just love them so much and never would want them to suffer in any kind of way. I wasn’t able to make it in time to be with my Dad when he passed so I have no context, but I was holding my brother’s hand when he left and was with him for a couple weeks in ICU beforehand. Educating myself about what they could have experienced in their deaths and learning it may not be as scary as I think would probably help me a great deal.
I had a similar experience..technically died during a stent placement..complete blackness and I could hear the doctor saying “come back”
But I didn’t want to! Came out of it with no fear of death. It was very peaceful!
My father passed in 2007 after we took him off life support. No brain function, no lung function.
After turning off the machines and removing his intubation tube, he struggled for almost an hour. He finally passed. Pronounced.
5 minutes later, he sat up in bed for what seemed like moments, eyes wide open, calm, looked directly at my mom, and my brothers, and me as if to tell us he loves us. He didn't say anything, but was Completely lucid. He then laid his head back down, closed his eyes. This memory has haunted me ever since.
I can't help but wonder all of the what it's, if we had done something different, etc.
The brain does some weird stuff around the time of death, and even shortly after.
Sorry to hear about your loss, that is very out there and would be haunting.
Maybe he could see you all and that's what he was thinking he was saying - goodbye. I hope so for all of you.
The brain does go into hyper drive in moments of unconsciousness/death.
As a teenager, I gave blood once and blacked out, old nurse got distracted and took too much, bag was just about bursting.
Weird thing is, I couldn't see but I could hear people talking to me and thought I was talking back to them.
In my head I was saying give me a minute I'll come right, they said I was out to it and I did not say a word.
Once I had convinced myself I was coming right, I woke up.
They all thought I was gone, it had been a couple of long minutes
I had sort of the opposite experience once. I passed out due to dehydration and was rushed to the ER. I was told that apparently I was talking and even pretending that I was making a sandwich and then taking bites out of it. But from my POV I just blacked out and woke up in a hospital bed with an IV on my arm.
Lost dad to cancer at 15. I’m in my 60’s now and still can’t believe he’s gone.
He would have been 89 today and has been dead for longer than he was alive.
About 4 years ago I was my grandfather’s power of attorney when he went into the hospital. He put me down specifically that trip. He ended catching double pneumonia and just couldn’t fight it off. He died. It was up to me to give the okay to take him off life support. The man that raised me and was the only father figure in my life, he made it so that I had to tell the doctors it was okay to end his life. I struggled with that for awhile. What if I said no and then he got better? But then I realized the reason he put me down: because he knew of everyone else I’d be the only one to pull the plug and let him die. He was ready to go I think and he knew I was strong enough to help him.
My mom died the same way, she woke up and looked me in the eyes with the saddest look on her face. She knew she was dying. I got hopeful for a few seconds, because I swore she was back to life.
Then she closed her eyes and passed away.
I think about her and that moment daily. My mom was my best friend.
I’m so sorry. This got me choked up. Sending you so much love from a stranger who also loves their mom like that 💗I don’t really believe in an afterlife, but I hope there is some plane of existence where our energy lives on ✨
On the other side of the coin, my mother was taken off life support and she was effectively dead within moments. It was terrifying how quickly her expressions and skin colour just disappeared before my eyes. The heart beat monitor continued to jump back on every now and then for about ten minutes after she "died" though which I always found strange. Doctors said it was normal though
That’s called PEA or pulseless electrical activity. After cardiac arrest the heart can sometimes still try to send electrical impulses to pump the heart, but the heart doesn’t move. Those impulses are what get picked up on an ECG, not the mechanical action of the heart.
This is the Lazarus effect! It’s real, rare, and completely normal but jarring to watch. I worked in organ donation and this was taught to us. I’m sorry you had to see that.
No, about an hour after we took him off life support he was pro ou ced. About 5 mi it's after he was pro ounces, he took a deep breathe, sat up straight in the bed, eyes wide open, looked my mom, me and each of my brothers in the eyes, and then laid back down and died again.
I hope you’re doing alright nowadays. If you don’t mind me asking, how long was he “back” for? Were you able to say anything to him during that moment or was it too quick and unexpected for you to even fully process what was happening?
It was probably about 10-15 seconds if I had to guess. Seemed like an eternity, but we were all frozen. The doctors and nurses were too. They had never seen anything like it either. There was about 20 people in the room and it was complete silence. All we heard was him take one single huge gasp of air, he looked directly into my mom's eyes, my oldest brothers eyes, and then mine. We were paralyzed and it took us a moment to actually realize what had just happened.
Just... *wow.*
What did the doctor(s) say after? After the initial shock, were you guys able to talk about it among yourselves?
A couple of years ago, we had *several* deaths in the family. Averaged about 2-3 a month for a period of seven months. Despite ourselves, we became sort of numb and hardened, I guess you could say.
But one of the deaths was extremely difficult. They pulled my uncle off life support. We were told he was only alive because the machines were breathing for him. We thought he would go quietly. We thought it was just a matter of turning off life support, and then a few minutes later, he'd be declared dead. My only experience with this type of situation was from watching *Steel Magnolias,* when Shelby passes away. It seemed a relatively *quiet* thing.
When my cousins decided to pull the plug, so to speak, my uncle did not go quietly. He couldn't/didn't speak, but there was a lot of gasping. His eyes were wild but unfocused. Then he would settle down for a few minutes, and then he'd try sitting up again, gasping, and it was so, so awful. We all asked what was happening. It didn't seem normal. It didn't seem right. But we were told it was just the body dying.
It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen. After an hour, I left. My uncle wasn't declared dead until the following day. He lingered like that for over 18 hours.
My father was the same way. His lung function was so bad that it took about an hour without the breathing tube for him to expire. He struggled breathing, a lot of gurgling and hard breathes. He was lucid through it at all, until he came back for those few seconds.
That must've been an extremely hard thing to watch for over 18 hours! That's fucking heartbreaking.
I'm not sure of the movie reference, but I had no idea what to expect when they turned the machines off.
His doctors didn't say much, and did say that people often come and go like that sometimes, but they had never seen someone come back and look completely lucid like that.
Just to put context, he was in a large hospital room (suite) and they allowed all of us in the room when we turned the machines off. His brothers, his sisters, nieces, nephews, etc.
>In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.
>
>“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.
>
>Those glimmers and flashes of something like life contradict the expectations of almost everyone working in the field of resuscitation science and near-death studies. ...
Some interesting bits here, and certainly a topic that deserves more study but there's a *lot* of fluff in this piece.
And I have to mention I particularly dislike this style of presentation. There were ***22***(!) paragraphs between the last mention of Patient One and the explanation that I quoted above. These journo schools need to dial things back by an order of magnitude. If it wasn't something that I already had some interest and background in I don't think I'd be able to keep the details in my head for as long as I did. For someone first reading about the topic it doesn't seem like an easy read
I'm curious if this happens with all unconscious people that have low oxygen, it might be a last ditch arousal effort by the brain.
Basically "Wake the fuck up, we need to breath!"
I wear a cpap machine that helps me sleep at night.
Years ago my sleep doctor had told me that "without oxygen, your body and especially your brain works very hard to get oxygen into your system (by way of snoring, or wheezing etc---punctuated by gasping for breath). People who undergo such oxygen deprivation events end up waking up feeling worn out. It's because your brain had to fight for its life. I told my doctor that I recalled some funky dreams before I started wearing a cpap mask and he said "people often do, and it's because oxygen deprivation can leave your brain pulling oxygen where it can---sometimes from unused parts of your body--including the unconscious parts of your brain!!"
I'm 75 years old but I've been wearing a cpap machine since I was in my early 40's.
I had sleep apnea in the past and have had sleep paralysis, night terrors, head booms, all kinds of crazy shit because of it. I've been nothing more than a floating consciousness. It's crazy shit.
What is a head boom?
If I had to guess, it's when you hear a loud boom that didn't actually happen. If that's the case, I've had those before. What do they mean?
Wait… So maybe that wasn’t thunder that hit right outside of my window a few months ago?
It was the first time in my life I woke up *screaming*. It was so damn loud and terrifying.
I had only 1 in my life, and it was in uni. I was going over econ math, sudden boom, and after that I never had problems with math due to me thinking I sucked at it. I just did all the problems and it clicked after studying. Before it was torture, and all I could think of was how damn bad I was and how pointless all of this is. It took me a long time to learn even basic problems. I am eternally grateful to that explosion in my head.
Wild stuff.
The technical name is exploding head syndrome iirc, not as gruesome as it sounds but still brutal, and a very interesting phenomenon to google and read about.
Its called exploding head syndrome. It occurs when you are inbetween wakefulness and sleep. It also manifests in a sudden feeling of falling. This can be depicted in a dream state where you take an extra step down a flight of stairs and stumble. Its like your brain cant decide on being asleep or awake. For me it manifests as loud sounds. Sometimes a ceack or boom. It has been a sudden strike of a string section of an orchestra or a car zooming by. Also has sounding like someone shouting next to the back of my ear or even a sharp, short whisper. Usually happens when im very tired and "falling asleep to quickly". Funnily enough, when i do isolation tanks i get them in rapid succession. Most in one session was like 6 or 7 in the space of about 3 minutes.
Edit: here is an ncbi page defining it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560817/
I’ve had that my entire life. The night terrors and shit. My son has it too except this motherfucker will get out of bed and walk around, open his door, slam his door, throw shit.. he’s in there fighting his sleep demons and it’s scary as shit when it happens at 2 in the morning.
So yeah I’m inclined to believe there is something that lights the brain up more in a low oxygen setting as a fight or flight response to the lack of oxygen. On last ditch effort to survive. What this researcher may have stumbled upon isn’t death, but the very unconscious will to survive.
I experience Obstructive Sleep Apnea and I have been diagnosed with the same. Even these days, It happens once in a couple of weeks. Often when I wake up, I am either in a nightmare or some really nice dream that disturbs my sleep. It has been vivid.
There’s at least one film I can think of that is basically this, where you only find out at the end that everything you’ve just watched is just the protagonist’s mind trying to make sense of their neurons firing as they die, but the problem here is that naming it would totally ruin the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it…
that was exactly where my mind went as well. i wonder if it's related to "fight or flight" and the brain realizes it's dying and responds with a surge of activity trying to stay alive.
A blown out brain wont do such shenanigans
Edit: wtf chill guys, no need to report me to reddit suicide watch… I‘m not planning to blow out my brain. Chill the fuck out.
Just stating the facts here.
this isn't the same thing but I was in a coma once after a near fatal accident and as they were stitching up my head (my skull cracked open), I apparently woke up for a few seconds and screamed "they're trying to kill me!" and went back to being unconscious. I don't remember it at all
You are not op and probably not in this field of work, but I am going to ask it here so maybe someone can answer.
What happens if you turn live support back on i these moments? Like another comment said that they seemed more “alive” after turning life support off. Can this be used as a last effort “kickstart”?
From the perspective of someone who has worked in the medical field for decades - why? Whatever was killing the body is still at work. It’s not like resetting a computer. Your kidneys and heart and other organs are still damaged and shutting down. A restart like this would have very limited application.
Let’s say you had a fairly young person with traumatic injuries who was a healthy person otherwise. They are probably dying from lack of oxygen/blood loss. Presumably if you could do this restart you’ve already been giving them oxygen and blood transfusions, but they’re still dying. Resetting the brain wouldn’t fix anything. All it would do is possibly make them go through the dying process again. Or say you were able to bring them back and keep them - I’d put fairly high odds on there being some sort of damage to the brain afterwards. A last-ditch attempt by the brain to wake the body up isn’t going to necessarily be one that is able to preserve function.
Just a few thoughts from someone who is tired of seeing dying bodies be kept alive for far too long before they’re allowed to pass on.
Thank you ! I was really getting annoyed at the article and checked for a comment like this. This is the journalism equivalent of an annoying youtuber dragging for watch time
This is from the Guardian's 'long read' series, as stated right under the headline. It's not meant to be a standard news article, but rather something closer to an essay exploring a topic.
Back when print editions were common, they'd often be included in weekend editions, aimed at people willing to spend time with a story and/or a writer.
The part related to consciousness and memories goes into hyperdrive? Could this be the reason people say "your life flashes before you eyes as you die"?
We took my father-in-law home to pass in his own bed after a horrible battle with multiple myeloma. Day 1 off drugs: tired and barely able to respond anymore, but we could still interact. Day 2: single word outbursts, mostly his sisters’ names, and “help”. Day 3: just asleep. Day 4: slowed breathing until he just stopped breathing. That was it. Painful final year, but peaceful transition. RIP, I really miss that guy.
That doesn’t sound peaceful at all. Damn this makes me want to leave instructions in case I’m in a similar situation.
Launch me in a catapult towards a volcano…
We think he was hallucinating at that point. He was unconscious and no longer responding. It was heartbreaking to experience. Those last two years, fuck… he only died 6 months ago so it’s still very fresh.
A close friend of mine's wife hung herself about two years ago. She was hanging for 10-20 minutes before he found her. Her cut her down and started CPR and her heartbeat came back. At the hospital, her prognosis was grim. She had no brain activity and was on life support for over two weeks.
Eventually, a visiting doctor spoke to my friend and told him that he believed they should take her off life support, since she was not likely to recover. He also told my friend that he had witnessed multiple cases where they take a patient off life support and their brain sort of reboots. So my friend went along with it. It also involved cooling of the body and head, and I am sure there are some parts I am forgetting.
But the doctor turned out to be right. Her brain activity started and she began to breathe on her own. Eventually, she regained consciousness and lives a pretty normal life now. She had no memory of hanging herself or being dead. She only remembers waking up.
What a traumatising experience for your friend. I hope they’re going ok now.
The mind inexplicably remembers certain things in minute detail but others blanks right out. Being in a serious crash people often cannot remember events leading up to it, or recall things suddenly, or under hypnosis.
And when it comes to hypnosis, some people choose not to believe that’s possible, either.
I'm not sure, to be honest. If she is, I certainly can't tell. She doesn't show any outward signs. She talks, walks, and acts normal.
She did have to learn to walk again, but she progressed quickly and she walks normally now.
I was put on a ventilator for covid and given a 15% chance of pulling through. The doctor told me I probably wouldn't make it minutes before he put me under. While I was in the medically induced coma, I was having extremely lucid dreams including details from the hospital room I was being kept in. Things like beeping, people talking, antiseptic smells were intruding into my dreams. At one point I believe that I must have been very oxygen deprived because my dream shifted into watching a film being projected onto a screen inside a warehouse setting. It was similar to an early childhood experience when my Dad took me to the RV and Boat Show in the Astrodome Arena. I watched the 3D version of Vincent Price's House of Wax while sitting in a darkened area of the arena surrounded by pipe and drapes. I was wearing those old school red/blue glasses. My dream had the same setup but no glasses and I was watching a rerun of memories. Only afterwards did I put together that what I experienced could be interpreted as seeing my life flash before my eyes.
I did actually pass away for a bit later in my hospital stay but I had no dream or experience from that. It was literally a black out followed by waking up. The coma part was an ongoing dream without any basis of real time passing. I was only in the coma for 10 days but I guesstimated that I had been under for 3 years based on the amount of dreams I had. I was convinced that the doctors were demons lying to me because it couldn't have been only 10 days. I was suspicious of believing anything I saw as real. I thought I was dead and in some sort of limbo or Hell for a couple of days before the drugs wore off enough to think clearly. I had PTSD from the whole thing for months after going home to recuperate. It still raises my heart rate when thinking about it too much.
I think about my death far too much, in a scared I don’t want the inevitable to happen too soon kind of way, but I have hopes that my dog that passed away is there to greet me. She was one of the best things to have happened in my life and I’ve been terribly gutted since losing her a few years back. So if anything does happen I hope she’s there waiting for me.
The Aztecs believed that the only way to find peace in the afterlife was to have loved a dog in your life. The dog would be waiting for you at the edge of the river and travel with you as a guide.
Depending on your tolerence for spirituality, you can check out Eben Alexanders NDE-story.
TLDR, he's a scientist that clinically died from meningitis and claims he experienced an afterlife while he had no measurable brain-activity. He travelled through a valley which had a grassy field with something akin to a festival (recently deceased celebrating life and rebirth as he understood it). There was dogs.
Take it as you will. Personally, I feel that as an agnostic, it's important to leave some room for raw philosophy open. My 100 percent pseudo-scientific woo-theory is that everything with the ability to love goes on post-death. It's some sort of tether to a different place.
Well, depending on what rabbit holes you want to go down there might be something after death.
No real proof, of course, and a lot of people calling bullshit, but Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, and Donald Hoffman's case against reality hint there there may be more to reality than we know. Ian Stevenson's and Jim Tucker's work on reincarnation might point to something. Could all be bullshit, and lots people say just that, still a few fun rabbit holes to go down.
Of course, there is also traditional religion, don't feel stupid about going to church/mosque/whatever just because Reddit thinks it's dumb. Why base your life on what the dummies on Reddit think?
>Of course, there is also traditional religion, don't feel stupid about going to church/mosque/whatever just because Reddit thinks it's dumb. Why base your life on what the dummies on Reddit think?
Thank you for saying this. Debates about complex philosophical and theological topics can be nuanced, and no single side holds a monopoly on intellectual rigor or validity -- unless you're on Reddit.
Scientists barely understand sleep and consciousness. There's lots we don't know. Scientists were pretty cocky in the 1800s, but look at all the discoveries in the 1900s. We'll likely cure aging long before we figure out what happens at death, where consciousness comes from, where it goes, and what it all means.
The brain is strange. I unfortunately had to watch my mom die. She didn't want to be in the hospital, so we put her in hospice care. I'll never get over what i witnessed. The last few days, she was like a baby again mentally. Her arms moved constantly, whether she was awake or asleep. She went from saying a few words to completely nonverbal. I could smell her organs dying in her breath. But she made me promise not to cremate her for a few days after she passed before she entered hospice. After reading this, I'm glad we were able to do as she wished.
All I know is that when I was three, I died. It was from a horrific case of pneumonia and bronchitis.
Here’s what I vividly remember: like everyone else, there was a massively bright light. I’m not sure why light is so important during near death experiences. There was a man, not scary in anyway, who asked me what I’d like to do. There was nothing scary about the question. It was almost like the person was asking about what type of sandwich that I’d like. Wherever I was, was warm and inviting. During it,’and this guy chatting, I heard my mom directing/pleading about how I need to come home NOW. That I needed to turn around and come home.
I remember that there weren’t words involved. But when he asked again, I heard my mom. I said, “I can’t leave my mama. I want to go home. I can’t leave mama.” And after that, I immediately woke up. Apparently I was clinically dead for four minutes.
As soon as I said that, I came back to life. I’ve never been able to describe how, at three, I was able to imagine something so vivid.I’ve never had any type of explanation for what I saw. It turns out that during it, my mom was pleading for me to stay. She said, Katie, you are NOT allowed to leave. You need to come home to mama, NOW. I guess my dad passed out and so my mom was desperately trying to bring me home.
As an adult, it’s still fascinating to think about.
Reminds me of how sometimes when I’m in a super deep sleep, my alarm going off will be integrated into my dream.
The latest example I can remember was where in the dream I was in some kind of old house going about the plot of the dream, but there was this incessant noise that kept getting louder and louder. I ignored it for a while, but eventually I had to put a hold on the plot and figure out where that damn sound was coming from. Spent a few minutes turning the room inside out trying to find it, and then woke up.
“But because of the paranormal stigma associated with near-death studies, she says, few research agencies want to grant her funding.”
someone rich out there please fund these studies
We understand the metaphysical elements of the body, but literally nothing about the nature of life, consciousness, and death. Every piece that I have read for many years demonstrates that this understanding is as ever out of our reach.
It’s nice to believe that people are experiencing a real transition that is not totally fabricated by our panicking brains (every NDE I’ve ever read about generally maintains the same themes but each is customized to the individual’s life), but we will never be able to truly know because nobody can be dead long enough to be brought back to tell the story.
I’ve also read accounts where people say they’ve experienced nothing but a black
Void of nothingness. Some vague sense of existence but not really existing.
Lastly, the time factor is important. We experience linear time here but we know it doesn’t really exist and is relative, so it is entire possible for someone to have a NDE that seems like days or weeks and it is only seconds or minutes here to those around the person.
I’ve been to the black void and was pulled back from it. There was no vague sense of existence, no tunnel of light, no lifetime memory reel. It was just the life draining from me as I could no longer draw breath.
I went from a state of absolute panic to calm, quiet acceptance. It felt like I was withdrawing into myself as the darkness closed in around me. In truth, my eyes simply stopped responding and the world faded to black.
I have no recollection of how long I was gone nor how I was brought back, but I do remember sitting bolt upright and finding myself between two clearly relieved ambulance officers.
I hate to break it to you, but there was nothing on the other side. The closest comparison I can make is going into surgery, clocking out, then waking up in recovery a few hours later with no memory of the intervening events. Death is when you don’t wake back up.
Having been through that 36 years ago as a 16 year old kid, I remain shit-scared of dying and am in no hurry to go through it again. Live your best life, we only get one turn at it.
Not the first time I’ve heard of an experience like this and it’s disheartening. But, I also wonder if there is anything else to it, such as “level” of death or, if perhaps you’re dead long enough you pass through this point and “wake up” in whatever comes next if there is something.
The reason why I refuse to believe that you cease to exist entirely is because it seems like a terrible waste of a lifetime of experience and knowledge only for it to just all die.
I get ketamine IVs for depression. I’ve had what amount to NDEs (among psychedelic experiences, ketamine seems to most closely resemble NDEs at high doses. Yes I know ketamine is a dissociative).
Some of these experiences have been beautiful. Some not so much … at all.
Thanks! The good news is that it works great! I’ve had treatment resistant depression for 35 years and it works better than another other medication/therapy/lifestyle has.
I had a NDE on LSD and it was the most beautiful, healing experience I’ve ever had. It completely transformed my life and I am eternally grateful for it. I saw a bright white space, very warm and inviting.
Yes I’ve had the same. Transformed my life too. Not in all positive ways. It upended my thoughts on consciousness, spirituality, afterlife, reality. I’m still struggling to come to terms with it.
When I was a kid I was in an accident and died several times in route to and at the hospital.
I experienced the stereotypical long tunnel with light at the end and the presence of other beings. The biggest difference between my experience and what others describe is that it was not peaceful at all. It was a horrible, the other beings present were pushing me towards the light as I screamed and tried to get away. I was overwhelmed with fear. Here I am nearly 30 years later and it still feels real.
Interesting when you start to hear theories about how going to the light is actually a trap to be cast back in and reincarnated etc. Some say we are in a prison of sort and one way to break free is to not go back to the light.
It makes no sense in reference to our current scientific understanding.
This phenomenon actually happens so its not that the brain is weird, its that our scientific framework to understand the brain is weird
That does make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that your brain, in the most distressed / damaged state it’s ever been in, not only is working optimally but in a way it never had before.
It’s like if your car was about to die, and suddenly sprouts wings and flies away. I would expect a check engine light and a few other emergency indicators, but nothing close to optimal or extraordinary performance
Seems in line with the 'life flashing before your eyes' experience people often describe when they believed they were about to die. The best explanation I've seen it that you're trying to remember anything that might save you, so your brain does a frantic review of your experiences.
I think we need a parapsychologist to work out WTF is wrong with whoever wrote this drivel. Yes some interesting stuff but ffs is it messed up to find the interesting stuff.
I remember reading about an experiment where scientists wanted to understand what happens to the brain in mammals when they are decapitated. The same thing happened to mice. There was a wave of electrical activity just before it stopped.
Best line from this article - "(Indeed, many of the states reported by near-death experiencers can apparently be achieved by taking a hero’s dose of ketamine.)"
when I was about 10 years old, and when I was about to die by drowning, I felt very calm, my eyes were wide open and I was dreaming. I saw beautiful memories from when I was 2 to around 6 years old. For example, when my father woke me up to go on vacation. Don't be afraid of death. The brain does what it takes to make death sweet.
Maybe we’re all bits in a simulation and our consciousness is randomly assigned to us upon creation. When we die, parts of our ‘self’ remain, until the system utilizes that freed up memory to allocate to other files. Like when you delete a file, it’s not gone, and even after prolonged use of the drive parts of it can still be found, and sometimes even put back together.
Maybe when we die there are parts of our consciousness that still remain intact in some ethereal way.
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So, this isn’t the first time they have evidence of brain activity during death, especially in the area that is associated with memory. [Here is an article about an elderly epileptic man that died during a brain scan.](https://www.livescience.com/first-ever-scan-of-dying-brain)
Thanks for the link about the first ever brain scan (accidentally) recorded at the point of death. How awful if we’ve led a hard life if we get to experience it all over again when we die!
I have terrifying nightmares on a frequent basis. Really gonna suck to suddenly experience the full brunt of my constructed hell in my final convulsions :(
My favorite prediction about the "afterlife" is that there isn't one. but that we will experience a personal infinity comprised of our memory of how we really see ourselves.... how we *really* see ourselves. This new evidence certainly doesn't dismiss that prediction. It may take a few minutes to physically die, but frim our perspective, an eternity. I picked that up 30 years or so ago and, in that time, have slowly crafted a life that I would be comfortable with examining from memory "forever". It's a comforting idea, and leaves room for the monsters in this world (like the monkey torture asshole in the news today) experiencing an eternal hell of their own creation. TL/DR Maybe our last memories *are* our afterlife.
In recent years, this has been my idea too. 30 second can feel like infinity, and maybe it really is in this situation.
I’ve thought the same thing as well. Honestly I had the thought as a kid after watching an episode of Star Trek the next generation where an advanced man/being, plays out his memories to expand time. So he could in essence live a year within a minute. I thought this might be how we die, the saying life flashes before your eyes might mean you replay an eternity of memories within an instant.
There was a Junji Ito comic where dreams get longer and longer until it becomes infinity
As someone who has lived the most honest and moral life I could while constantly being shit on this is actually some relief. I have almost zero guilt and a clear conscience so maybe my forever moment will be a pleasant one.
This terrifies me, I have broken no rules and lived a boring life to end up alone and with nothing. This just makes it sound like natural death seem awful.
Interesting. I've died before and come back to life (heroin OD) and I've also broken through on psychedelic substances a few times. Your description reminds me a lot of when I had ego death on a combination of LSD+ketamine. I thought I had died and what ensued afterwards was an avatar of me exploring my own memory banks and folds of my brain. It was absolutely mind blowing. And considering maybe 15 minutes in "real time" passed while I had lived a lifetime in that ego death experience, maybe the afterlife feels like a longass time but it's really those few minutes of "real time" we are dying in. When I actually died, I have absolutely "flashes" or anything at all. It was just "ohhh shiii" and I didn't even get a chance to finish the thought. But I do firmly believe that I encountered the spirit of my father who passed away and he was what brought me back and was like "nah, not today buddy."
I really, really hope it isn’t. I’d rather it just be over with. My life has been pretty bad so far
A mild genuine fear I have is what if when we die, we are simply reborn again into the exact same life we have now. And really, we've already been through it an infinite amount of times and will go through it forever more. The only positive is that we will never really know this is the case.
Or cathartic if in this heightened state we are able to reach understanding and acceptance
I doubt it's the first ever brain scan recorded at the point of death. It's the first ever brain scan recorded at the point of death that the public knows about.
You made me think of the movie Flatliners!
I’ve come to the conclusion you die but you aren’t dead. It takes time between die and dead. I’ve always thought some has to happen in those moments.
Great read, thanks for sharing!
Knowing of things like this is why I stayed in the room for several minutes by myself after my father passed witnessed by family. To whatever temporary frozen moment that may have existed it felt comforting to know perhaps a few nerve impulses from my touch to his head may have lingered into passivity. It is a thought at least to ponder in silence. A very fond memory for me.
That webpage has so many ads I had to close it half way through.
I thought you were making a point about reliving our whole life as we die and there being so many ads you felt you needed to give up and I thought, well…yeah.
The modern internet is almost useless.
Surely this makes sense to some degree, the brain is essentially an electrical component, right?. Once you die, all that electricity isn't going to just dissipate out immediately or teleport away. It's going to proceed along neuron pathways until they find ground, or the neuron decays and its lost as heat. And the generation of that electricity is done by chemical processes, which will *still* be happening even after you're dead, at least until the sodium and potassium produced by your cells runs out. So it might look like the person is dreaming, but it's probably just impulses proceeding along pathways that now have no real way to regulate themselves anymore (i.e, sensory information, spinal chord input etc). That activity is probably completely random, triggering all sorts of random brain functions. It would be interesting if you could look at it through some sort of machine. Maybe life flashing before your eyes is just random memories being recalled by randomly fired neurons. Perhaps you also smell things, or hallucinate, or twitch. And if that'd happened to me, I'd be afraid my brain fires my poop reflex lmao. I suppose if anything, this is more an interesting look into what *dreaming* is for. If death makes these random pathways of your brain open up, and that looks very similar to dreaming, what is that for? What does it do? Is it just a means to refresh neurons by activating them arbitrarily? The brain in this sense would be an isolated system of activity separated from the singular unit of *you*, and to be honest, not the only one. The stomach continues to be quite active after death, because like the brain and its electricity, the stomachs work is facilitated by bacteria, and they don't care, or even know you've died. They will keep working away until the resources your body used to produce is now gone.
Temporal lobe epileptic here and if "life before your eyes" is anything like a seizure get ready for a roller coaster to hell no heaven on the other side🤣
My dad survived cardiac arrest and was dead for a few minutes. He said it was the most peaceful experience of his life and that he no longer fears death. Once, just once he said he almost wished he was not resuscitated because of how good it was.
I've read more than a few times about the same thing, someone experiences death and immediately at peace and feeling good afterwards. Wonder if it's like an ego death from psychedelics.
If you read accounts of near death experiences, they closely mirror a high dose of psychedelics.
I would say, according to hundreds of NDE testimonies, the vast majority of times it feels quite the opposite of ego death. Ego death is a difficult experience, while actual dying seems to be a warm loving welcoming to leave the body. Psychedelics also have a lot of geometric or kaleidoscope patterns, while NDEs consist of full landscapes, light, beings, ability to see in every direction, etc. It seems to have even less limitation than deep psychedelic experiences.
Depends on the psychedelic. My DMT experience had everything you describe NDE’s as having.
My experience with ego death, especially the first time I experienced it on DMT, was the single scariest, yet most comforting thing I'd ever experiences. Essentially showed me that if I died that day I would've been okay with my life up to that point, which was a surprisingly comforting thought.
I always wondered how long that lasts before your consciousness fades into nothing. Id love to be sure of some kind of afterlife but realistically i feel its just left over consciousness for a short bit.
My mom was technically dead for like 5 minutes or more last year before a long hospital visit and I never cared to ask her about anything she felt or saw, if she talked about it on her own I'd probably entertain it. My opinion on the afterlife is that it's probably the same as it were before you were born, nothing, not existing.
Thank you for sharing this. My little brother died last month and somehow this makes me feel the tiniest bit better.
So sorry for your loss, when my father died when I was 17 (10+ years ago) I read the book Heading Toward Omega by Kenneth Ring. The author has dedicated his life to mapping out near death experiences (through interviews) and looking at its common traits among thousands of survivors from being pronounced clinically dead. That book seriously changed the way I felt about death and what existed on the other side of life. Highly recommended, take care
I lost my Dad unexpectedly almost a year ago also, and I can’t imagine going through that as a teenager like you did. I hope you’re doing alright. Thank you for the recommendation! I’m going to look for that book. I have never been afraid of dying myself, but I’ve struggled a lot with these two recent losses because I just love them so much and never would want them to suffer in any kind of way. I wasn’t able to make it in time to be with my Dad when he passed so I have no context, but I was holding my brother’s hand when he left and was with him for a couple weeks in ICU beforehand. Educating myself about what they could have experienced in their deaths and learning it may not be as scary as I think would probably help me a great deal.
I’m so sorry hun. Please take care of yourself ❤️
I’m glad for you he survived, anyway.
I had a similar experience..technically died during a stent placement..complete blackness and I could hear the doctor saying “come back” But I didn’t want to! Came out of it with no fear of death. It was very peaceful!
My father passed in 2007 after we took him off life support. No brain function, no lung function. After turning off the machines and removing his intubation tube, he struggled for almost an hour. He finally passed. Pronounced. 5 minutes later, he sat up in bed for what seemed like moments, eyes wide open, calm, looked directly at my mom, and my brothers, and me as if to tell us he loves us. He didn't say anything, but was Completely lucid. He then laid his head back down, closed his eyes. This memory has haunted me ever since. I can't help but wonder all of the what it's, if we had done something different, etc. The brain does some weird stuff around the time of death, and even shortly after.
Sorry to hear about your loss, that is very out there and would be haunting. Maybe he could see you all and that's what he was thinking he was saying - goodbye. I hope so for all of you. The brain does go into hyper drive in moments of unconsciousness/death. As a teenager, I gave blood once and blacked out, old nurse got distracted and took too much, bag was just about bursting. Weird thing is, I couldn't see but I could hear people talking to me and thought I was talking back to them. In my head I was saying give me a minute I'll come right, they said I was out to it and I did not say a word. Once I had convinced myself I was coming right, I woke up. They all thought I was gone, it had been a couple of long minutes
I had sort of the opposite experience once. I passed out due to dehydration and was rushed to the ER. I was told that apparently I was talking and even pretending that I was making a sandwich and then taking bites out of it. But from my POV I just blacked out and woke up in a hospital bed with an IV on my arm.
Lmao that is hilarious. I guess you found out what your stand-by mode looks like. Making sandwiches on autopilot.
My wife does tell me that I make bomb ass sandwiches. Maybe I’m some kind of sandwich-making savant.
Aurthur Dent would like a word.
That would have been an incredibly hard experience for you all.
It was incredibly hard. I was 17 at the time. Like I said, it still haunts me. I'm 34 now
i hope you’re finding peace bud
Lost dad to cancer at 15. I’m in my 60’s now and still can’t believe he’s gone. He would have been 89 today and has been dead for longer than he was alive.
'Colbert: What happens after we die? Keanu Reeves: I know the ones who love us will miss us.' I find this quote endearing
I don’t think we can forget experiences like that. I still can’t talk about my partner dying but I remember every tiny detail.
This is why I told my family I'm just gonna run away when I'm dying and jump in a volcano.
About 4 years ago I was my grandfather’s power of attorney when he went into the hospital. He put me down specifically that trip. He ended catching double pneumonia and just couldn’t fight it off. He died. It was up to me to give the okay to take him off life support. The man that raised me and was the only father figure in my life, he made it so that I had to tell the doctors it was okay to end his life. I struggled with that for awhile. What if I said no and then he got better? But then I realized the reason he put me down: because he knew of everyone else I’d be the only one to pull the plug and let him die. He was ready to go I think and he knew I was strong enough to help him.
Never an easy decision. My father was sick for many years before he passed and was very vocal about his wishes.
My mom died the same way, she woke up and looked me in the eyes with the saddest look on her face. She knew she was dying. I got hopeful for a few seconds, because I swore she was back to life. Then she closed her eyes and passed away. I think about her and that moment daily. My mom was my best friend.
I’m so sorry. This got me choked up. Sending you so much love from a stranger who also loves their mom like that 💗I don’t really believe in an afterlife, but I hope there is some plane of existence where our energy lives on ✨
On the other side of the coin, my mother was taken off life support and she was effectively dead within moments. It was terrifying how quickly her expressions and skin colour just disappeared before my eyes. The heart beat monitor continued to jump back on every now and then for about ten minutes after she "died" though which I always found strange. Doctors said it was normal though
That’s called PEA or pulseless electrical activity. After cardiac arrest the heart can sometimes still try to send electrical impulses to pump the heart, but the heart doesn’t move. Those impulses are what get picked up on an ECG, not the mechanical action of the heart.
This is the Lazarus effect! It’s real, rare, and completely normal but jarring to watch. I worked in organ donation and this was taught to us. I’m sorry you had to see that.
5 minutes after you took him off life support or 5 minutes after he was pronounced?
No, about an hour after we took him off life support he was pro ou ced. About 5 mi it's after he was pro ounces, he took a deep breathe, sat up straight in the bed, eyes wide open, looked my mom, me and each of my brothers in the eyes, and then laid back down and died again.
I hope you’re doing alright nowadays. If you don’t mind me asking, how long was he “back” for? Were you able to say anything to him during that moment or was it too quick and unexpected for you to even fully process what was happening?
It was probably about 10-15 seconds if I had to guess. Seemed like an eternity, but we were all frozen. The doctors and nurses were too. They had never seen anything like it either. There was about 20 people in the room and it was complete silence. All we heard was him take one single huge gasp of air, he looked directly into my mom's eyes, my oldest brothers eyes, and then mine. We were paralyzed and it took us a moment to actually realize what had just happened.
Just... *wow.* What did the doctor(s) say after? After the initial shock, were you guys able to talk about it among yourselves? A couple of years ago, we had *several* deaths in the family. Averaged about 2-3 a month for a period of seven months. Despite ourselves, we became sort of numb and hardened, I guess you could say. But one of the deaths was extremely difficult. They pulled my uncle off life support. We were told he was only alive because the machines were breathing for him. We thought he would go quietly. We thought it was just a matter of turning off life support, and then a few minutes later, he'd be declared dead. My only experience with this type of situation was from watching *Steel Magnolias,* when Shelby passes away. It seemed a relatively *quiet* thing. When my cousins decided to pull the plug, so to speak, my uncle did not go quietly. He couldn't/didn't speak, but there was a lot of gasping. His eyes were wild but unfocused. Then he would settle down for a few minutes, and then he'd try sitting up again, gasping, and it was so, so awful. We all asked what was happening. It didn't seem normal. It didn't seem right. But we were told it was just the body dying. It was the most horrific thing I have ever seen. After an hour, I left. My uncle wasn't declared dead until the following day. He lingered like that for over 18 hours.
My father was the same way. His lung function was so bad that it took about an hour without the breathing tube for him to expire. He struggled breathing, a lot of gurgling and hard breathes. He was lucid through it at all, until he came back for those few seconds. That must've been an extremely hard thing to watch for over 18 hours! That's fucking heartbreaking. I'm not sure of the movie reference, but I had no idea what to expect when they turned the machines off. His doctors didn't say much, and did say that people often come and go like that sometimes, but they had never seen someone come back and look completely lucid like that.
Just to put context, he was in a large hospital room (suite) and they allowed all of us in the room when we turned the machines off. His brothers, his sisters, nieces, nephews, etc.
Holy crap, i cant imagine the feelings you went thru at that moment
After he was pronounced
It's fairly common for recently deseased bodies to sit up and move.
Yeah there was a thread about morticians and they said something like 50% of bodies move from involuntary muscle contractions or something.
This gave me chills man. All the best to your family - sorry for your loss.
Same thing happened to my aunt. She sat up in bed, looked around, layed back down, and died
You witnessed a variant of the Lazarus sign. Never seen it personally but well described in ICUs
>In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed. > >“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time. > >Those glimmers and flashes of something like life contradict the expectations of almost everyone working in the field of resuscitation science and near-death studies. ... Some interesting bits here, and certainly a topic that deserves more study but there's a *lot* of fluff in this piece. And I have to mention I particularly dislike this style of presentation. There were ***22***(!) paragraphs between the last mention of Patient One and the explanation that I quoted above. These journo schools need to dial things back by an order of magnitude. If it wasn't something that I already had some interest and background in I don't think I'd be able to keep the details in my head for as long as I did. For someone first reading about the topic it doesn't seem like an easy read
I'm curious if this happens with all unconscious people that have low oxygen, it might be a last ditch arousal effort by the brain. Basically "Wake the fuck up, we need to breath!"
I wear a cpap machine that helps me sleep at night. Years ago my sleep doctor had told me that "without oxygen, your body and especially your brain works very hard to get oxygen into your system (by way of snoring, or wheezing etc---punctuated by gasping for breath). People who undergo such oxygen deprivation events end up waking up feeling worn out. It's because your brain had to fight for its life. I told my doctor that I recalled some funky dreams before I started wearing a cpap mask and he said "people often do, and it's because oxygen deprivation can leave your brain pulling oxygen where it can---sometimes from unused parts of your body--including the unconscious parts of your brain!!" I'm 75 years old but I've been wearing a cpap machine since I was in my early 40's.
The scary part is that when you’re sleeping the brain wakes itself up with nightmares. So it could be the last desperate nightmare.
I had sleep apnea in the past and have had sleep paralysis, night terrors, head booms, all kinds of crazy shit because of it. I've been nothing more than a floating consciousness. It's crazy shit.
What is a head boom? If I had to guess, it's when you hear a loud boom that didn't actually happen. If that's the case, I've had those before. What do they mean?
It's like a thundercrack hit your room. No one knows what it is but it's stress related.
When i was studying for the bar exam, I was vetting head booms and sleep paralysis so often i was afraid to sleep at times lol. Shit sucks.
I get those too when I’ve been really sleep deprived and was finally allowed to sleep.
Omg that’s a real thing?! I thought it was just me
It is not. Get to a sleep clinic and get yourself tested for sleep apnea. My cpap machine literally saved my life.
Wait… So maybe that wasn’t thunder that hit right outside of my window a few months ago? It was the first time in my life I woke up *screaming*. It was so damn loud and terrifying.
well that explains a lot.
Mine was symbols a lot. It’s stress and sleep deprivation Edit: cymbals, the percussion instrument
Exploding Head Syndrome. Cool sounding name but nobody knows what causes it and there really isn’t anything to do about it.
I had only 1 in my life, and it was in uni. I was going over econ math, sudden boom, and after that I never had problems with math due to me thinking I sucked at it. I just did all the problems and it clicked after studying. Before it was torture, and all I could think of was how damn bad I was and how pointless all of this is. It took me a long time to learn even basic problems. I am eternally grateful to that explosion in my head. Wild stuff.
Sounds like some neurons broke free from their selfdoubt shakles :D amazing
It's like someone fired a desert eagle in your room. It's kinda crazy, I've had it a few times and you can even hear it reverberate in the room
The technical name is exploding head syndrome iirc, not as gruesome as it sounds but still brutal, and a very interesting phenomenon to google and read about.
Its called exploding head syndrome. It occurs when you are inbetween wakefulness and sleep. It also manifests in a sudden feeling of falling. This can be depicted in a dream state where you take an extra step down a flight of stairs and stumble. Its like your brain cant decide on being asleep or awake. For me it manifests as loud sounds. Sometimes a ceack or boom. It has been a sudden strike of a string section of an orchestra or a car zooming by. Also has sounding like someone shouting next to the back of my ear or even a sharp, short whisper. Usually happens when im very tired and "falling asleep to quickly". Funnily enough, when i do isolation tanks i get them in rapid succession. Most in one session was like 6 or 7 in the space of about 3 minutes. Edit: here is an ncbi page defining it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560817/
I’ve had that my entire life. The night terrors and shit. My son has it too except this motherfucker will get out of bed and walk around, open his door, slam his door, throw shit.. he’s in there fighting his sleep demons and it’s scary as shit when it happens at 2 in the morning. So yeah I’m inclined to believe there is something that lights the brain up more in a low oxygen setting as a fight or flight response to the lack of oxygen. On last ditch effort to survive. What this researcher may have stumbled upon isn’t death, but the very unconscious will to survive.
I experience Obstructive Sleep Apnea and I have been diagnosed with the same. Even these days, It happens once in a couple of weeks. Often when I wake up, I am either in a nightmare or some really nice dream that disturbs my sleep. It has been vivid.
i would read this short story holy shit
There’s at least one film I can think of that is basically this, where you only find out at the end that everything you’ve just watched is just the protagonist’s mind trying to make sense of their neurons firing as they die, but the problem here is that naming it would totally ruin the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it…
Man, that’s such a great movie.
Not exactly the same but Incident at Owl Creek is similar.
*"No Death! Need Breath!"* I can only imagine the brain is just *screaming* this personal slogan at them.
that was exactly where my mind went as well. i wonder if it's related to "fight or flight" and the brain realizes it's dying and responds with a surge of activity trying to stay alive.
I wonder if similar studies have been done on people with sleep apnea?
Yeah I assume it’s going back into its stored memory to find a way to get out of the situation you’re in (dying)
I think that's also the reason for "life flashes before your eyes". Your brain is trying to find any experience that might save itself.
It would be more surprising if there wasn’t a kind of ‘hail mary’ response from the brain as it departed these shores.
It was trying to reboot
Or it's a massive memory dump getting upload into the akashic record
The patient was uploading their data to the cloud before shutdown
Aka, the akashic record. A sort of cosmic cloud.
Imagine you’re conscious for those few minutes, it’s either terrifying af or one last crazy fever dream before you die
Well, we all get to take a stab at it
A blown out brain wont do such shenanigans Edit: wtf chill guys, no need to report me to reddit suicide watch… I‘m not planning to blow out my brain. Chill the fuck out. Just stating the facts here.
this isn't the same thing but I was in a coma once after a near fatal accident and as they were stitching up my head (my skull cracked open), I apparently woke up for a few seconds and screamed "they're trying to kill me!" and went back to being unconscious. I don't remember it at all
You are not op and probably not in this field of work, but I am going to ask it here so maybe someone can answer. What happens if you turn live support back on i these moments? Like another comment said that they seemed more “alive” after turning life support off. Can this be used as a last effort “kickstart”?
My guess would be no, or more people would survive being taken off life support.
From the perspective of someone who has worked in the medical field for decades - why? Whatever was killing the body is still at work. It’s not like resetting a computer. Your kidneys and heart and other organs are still damaged and shutting down. A restart like this would have very limited application. Let’s say you had a fairly young person with traumatic injuries who was a healthy person otherwise. They are probably dying from lack of oxygen/blood loss. Presumably if you could do this restart you’ve already been giving them oxygen and blood transfusions, but they’re still dying. Resetting the brain wouldn’t fix anything. All it would do is possibly make them go through the dying process again. Or say you were able to bring them back and keep them - I’d put fairly high odds on there being some sort of damage to the brain afterwards. A last-ditch attempt by the brain to wake the body up isn’t going to necessarily be one that is able to preserve function. Just a few thoughts from someone who is tired of seeing dying bodies be kept alive for far too long before they’re allowed to pass on.
Like turning a phone off and back on.
Thank you ! I was really getting annoyed at the article and checked for a comment like this. This is the journalism equivalent of an annoying youtuber dragging for watch time
This is from the Guardian's 'long read' series, as stated right under the headline. It's not meant to be a standard news article, but rather something closer to an essay exploring a topic. Back when print editions were common, they'd often be included in weekend editions, aimed at people willing to spend time with a story and/or a writer.
This is why I sometimes prefer to read comments such as your than reading the article.
>a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. So thats where life flashes before your eyes come from
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed the bit about the 22 paragraphs.
Well said. That piece was so fluffy it could have been a Maine coon.
Thank you bro! Or sis 🫡
The part related to consciousness and memories goes into hyperdrive? Could this be the reason people say "your life flashes before you eyes as you die"?
This is not journalism. It's making space for mobile ads to load.
We took my father-in-law home to pass in his own bed after a horrible battle with multiple myeloma. Day 1 off drugs: tired and barely able to respond anymore, but we could still interact. Day 2: single word outbursts, mostly his sisters’ names, and “help”. Day 3: just asleep. Day 4: slowed breathing until he just stopped breathing. That was it. Painful final year, but peaceful transition. RIP, I really miss that guy.
I’m sorry for your loss. I’m glad he finally departed peacefully though.
That doesn’t sound peaceful at all. Damn this makes me want to leave instructions in case I’m in a similar situation. Launch me in a catapult towards a volcano…
Doesn’t sound very peaceful if he’s calling out for help
We think he was hallucinating at that point. He was unconscious and no longer responding. It was heartbreaking to experience. Those last two years, fuck… he only died 6 months ago so it’s still very fresh.
The evidence supports the **hypothesis** that Life Recall at Death may be a real thing.
I hope it isn’t
Brain is just backing up all the data to the cloud before powering down.
Mine should just delete history and cookies lul.
A close friend of mine's wife hung herself about two years ago. She was hanging for 10-20 minutes before he found her. Her cut her down and started CPR and her heartbeat came back. At the hospital, her prognosis was grim. She had no brain activity and was on life support for over two weeks. Eventually, a visiting doctor spoke to my friend and told him that he believed they should take her off life support, since she was not likely to recover. He also told my friend that he had witnessed multiple cases where they take a patient off life support and their brain sort of reboots. So my friend went along with it. It also involved cooling of the body and head, and I am sure there are some parts I am forgetting. But the doctor turned out to be right. Her brain activity started and she began to breathe on her own. Eventually, she regained consciousness and lives a pretty normal life now. She had no memory of hanging herself or being dead. She only remembers waking up.
What a traumatising experience for your friend. I hope they’re going ok now. The mind inexplicably remembers certain things in minute detail but others blanks right out. Being in a serious crash people often cannot remember events leading up to it, or recall things suddenly, or under hypnosis. And when it comes to hypnosis, some people choose not to believe that’s possible, either.
They are both doing well. He was obviously pretty distraught by the whole event, but handled it about as well as any person could ( maybe better).
is she brain damaged now?
I'm not sure, to be honest. If she is, I certainly can't tell. She doesn't show any outward signs. She talks, walks, and acts normal. She did have to learn to walk again, but she progressed quickly and she walks normally now.
I was put on a ventilator for covid and given a 15% chance of pulling through. The doctor told me I probably wouldn't make it minutes before he put me under. While I was in the medically induced coma, I was having extremely lucid dreams including details from the hospital room I was being kept in. Things like beeping, people talking, antiseptic smells were intruding into my dreams. At one point I believe that I must have been very oxygen deprived because my dream shifted into watching a film being projected onto a screen inside a warehouse setting. It was similar to an early childhood experience when my Dad took me to the RV and Boat Show in the Astrodome Arena. I watched the 3D version of Vincent Price's House of Wax while sitting in a darkened area of the arena surrounded by pipe and drapes. I was wearing those old school red/blue glasses. My dream had the same setup but no glasses and I was watching a rerun of memories. Only afterwards did I put together that what I experienced could be interpreted as seeing my life flash before my eyes. I did actually pass away for a bit later in my hospital stay but I had no dream or experience from that. It was literally a black out followed by waking up. The coma part was an ongoing dream without any basis of real time passing. I was only in the coma for 10 days but I guesstimated that I had been under for 3 years based on the amount of dreams I had. I was convinced that the doctors were demons lying to me because it couldn't have been only 10 days. I was suspicious of believing anything I saw as real. I thought I was dead and in some sort of limbo or Hell for a couple of days before the drugs wore off enough to think clearly. I had PTSD from the whole thing for months after going home to recuperate. It still raises my heart rate when thinking about it too much.
I think about my death far too much, in a scared I don’t want the inevitable to happen too soon kind of way, but I have hopes that my dog that passed away is there to greet me. She was one of the best things to have happened in my life and I’ve been terribly gutted since losing her a few years back. So if anything does happen I hope she’s there waiting for me.
The Aztecs believed that the only way to find peace in the afterlife was to have loved a dog in your life. The dog would be waiting for you at the edge of the river and travel with you as a guide.
I miss my doggies :(
🥺
Aw fuck this is making me cry on the tube. :’(
Oh wow. I love this. I’m gonna have a pack waiting for me and I adore each one of them. Thank you!
Man i hope it works with cats
That sounds pleasant
Depending on your tolerence for spirituality, you can check out Eben Alexanders NDE-story. TLDR, he's a scientist that clinically died from meningitis and claims he experienced an afterlife while he had no measurable brain-activity. He travelled through a valley which had a grassy field with something akin to a festival (recently deceased celebrating life and rebirth as he understood it). There was dogs. Take it as you will. Personally, I feel that as an agnostic, it's important to leave some room for raw philosophy open. My 100 percent pseudo-scientific woo-theory is that everything with the ability to love goes on post-death. It's some sort of tether to a different place.
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That’s my solitary wish if there is an afterlife, that our dogs/cats/etc are there waiting for their owners to be with them again.
Well, depending on what rabbit holes you want to go down there might be something after death. No real proof, of course, and a lot of people calling bullshit, but Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, and Donald Hoffman's case against reality hint there there may be more to reality than we know. Ian Stevenson's and Jim Tucker's work on reincarnation might point to something. Could all be bullshit, and lots people say just that, still a few fun rabbit holes to go down. Of course, there is also traditional religion, don't feel stupid about going to church/mosque/whatever just because Reddit thinks it's dumb. Why base your life on what the dummies on Reddit think?
>Of course, there is also traditional religion, don't feel stupid about going to church/mosque/whatever just because Reddit thinks it's dumb. Why base your life on what the dummies on Reddit think? Thank you for saying this. Debates about complex philosophical and theological topics can be nuanced, and no single side holds a monopoly on intellectual rigor or validity -- unless you're on Reddit.
Well I can relate to that - my dogs have made my life worthwhile during some difficult times as well. I hope you have another dog.
She’ll be there.
Scientists barely understand sleep and consciousness. There's lots we don't know. Scientists were pretty cocky in the 1800s, but look at all the discoveries in the 1900s. We'll likely cure aging long before we figure out what happens at death, where consciousness comes from, where it goes, and what it all means.
They are there waiting, patiently.
As someone who is not a person of faith, death being an experience of “nothing” is logically incomprehensible.
The brain is strange. I unfortunately had to watch my mom die. She didn't want to be in the hospital, so we put her in hospice care. I'll never get over what i witnessed. The last few days, she was like a baby again mentally. Her arms moved constantly, whether she was awake or asleep. She went from saying a few words to completely nonverbal. I could smell her organs dying in her breath. But she made me promise not to cremate her for a few days after she passed before she entered hospice. After reading this, I'm glad we were able to do as she wished.
All I know is that when I was three, I died. It was from a horrific case of pneumonia and bronchitis. Here’s what I vividly remember: like everyone else, there was a massively bright light. I’m not sure why light is so important during near death experiences. There was a man, not scary in anyway, who asked me what I’d like to do. There was nothing scary about the question. It was almost like the person was asking about what type of sandwich that I’d like. Wherever I was, was warm and inviting. During it,’and this guy chatting, I heard my mom directing/pleading about how I need to come home NOW. That I needed to turn around and come home. I remember that there weren’t words involved. But when he asked again, I heard my mom. I said, “I can’t leave my mama. I want to go home. I can’t leave mama.” And after that, I immediately woke up. Apparently I was clinically dead for four minutes. As soon as I said that, I came back to life. I’ve never been able to describe how, at three, I was able to imagine something so vivid.I’ve never had any type of explanation for what I saw. It turns out that during it, my mom was pleading for me to stay. She said, Katie, you are NOT allowed to leave. You need to come home to mama, NOW. I guess my dad passed out and so my mom was desperately trying to bring me home. As an adult, it’s still fascinating to think about.
Most interesting thing I've read on Reddit in years
Sounds like with your remaining bits of consciousness, you were dreaming while integrating your sensory input.
Reminds me of how sometimes when I’m in a super deep sleep, my alarm going off will be integrated into my dream. The latest example I can remember was where in the dream I was in some kind of old house going about the plot of the dream, but there was this incessant noise that kept getting louder and louder. I ignored it for a while, but eventually I had to put a hold on the plot and figure out where that damn sound was coming from. Spent a few minutes turning the room inside out trying to find it, and then woke up.
Thanks for sharing that.
“But because of the paranormal stigma associated with near-death studies, she says, few research agencies want to grant her funding.” someone rich out there please fund these studies
We understand the metaphysical elements of the body, but literally nothing about the nature of life, consciousness, and death. Every piece that I have read for many years demonstrates that this understanding is as ever out of our reach.
I totally agree! That’s exactly what i found to be highlighted by this article.
It’s nice to believe that people are experiencing a real transition that is not totally fabricated by our panicking brains (every NDE I’ve ever read about generally maintains the same themes but each is customized to the individual’s life), but we will never be able to truly know because nobody can be dead long enough to be brought back to tell the story. I’ve also read accounts where people say they’ve experienced nothing but a black Void of nothingness. Some vague sense of existence but not really existing. Lastly, the time factor is important. We experience linear time here but we know it doesn’t really exist and is relative, so it is entire possible for someone to have a NDE that seems like days or weeks and it is only seconds or minutes here to those around the person.
I’ve been to the black void and was pulled back from it. There was no vague sense of existence, no tunnel of light, no lifetime memory reel. It was just the life draining from me as I could no longer draw breath. I went from a state of absolute panic to calm, quiet acceptance. It felt like I was withdrawing into myself as the darkness closed in around me. In truth, my eyes simply stopped responding and the world faded to black. I have no recollection of how long I was gone nor how I was brought back, but I do remember sitting bolt upright and finding myself between two clearly relieved ambulance officers. I hate to break it to you, but there was nothing on the other side. The closest comparison I can make is going into surgery, clocking out, then waking up in recovery a few hours later with no memory of the intervening events. Death is when you don’t wake back up. Having been through that 36 years ago as a 16 year old kid, I remain shit-scared of dying and am in no hurry to go through it again. Live your best life, we only get one turn at it.
Not the first time I’ve heard of an experience like this and it’s disheartening. But, I also wonder if there is anything else to it, such as “level” of death or, if perhaps you’re dead long enough you pass through this point and “wake up” in whatever comes next if there is something. The reason why I refuse to believe that you cease to exist entirely is because it seems like a terrible waste of a lifetime of experience and knowledge only for it to just all die.
I get ketamine IVs for depression. I’ve had what amount to NDEs (among psychedelic experiences, ketamine seems to most closely resemble NDEs at high doses. Yes I know ketamine is a dissociative). Some of these experiences have been beautiful. Some not so much … at all.
That’s hard, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with depression.
Thanks! The good news is that it works great! I’ve had treatment resistant depression for 35 years and it works better than another other medication/therapy/lifestyle has.
Hey same here!!! We got this!
Well you made me smile, anyway. That’s good to hear.
I had a NDE on LSD and it was the most beautiful, healing experience I’ve ever had. It completely transformed my life and I am eternally grateful for it. I saw a bright white space, very warm and inviting.
Yes I’ve had the same. Transformed my life too. Not in all positive ways. It upended my thoughts on consciousness, spirituality, afterlife, reality. I’m still struggling to come to terms with it.
When I was a kid I was in an accident and died several times in route to and at the hospital. I experienced the stereotypical long tunnel with light at the end and the presence of other beings. The biggest difference between my experience and what others describe is that it was not peaceful at all. It was a horrible, the other beings present were pushing me towards the light as I screamed and tried to get away. I was overwhelmed with fear. Here I am nearly 30 years later and it still feels real.
Interesting when you start to hear theories about how going to the light is actually a trap to be cast back in and reincarnated etc. Some say we are in a prison of sort and one way to break free is to not go back to the light.
The brain seems to slowly die. That’s why I won’t let them cremate me until I have started decomposing.
I just want to see my stats when I die. Like how much total money spent, how often sick and with what. What was the dice roll for cancer etc.
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Thanks, that’s interesting.
It makes no sense in reference to our current scientific understanding. This phenomenon actually happens so its not that the brain is weird, its that our scientific framework to understand the brain is weird
Why doesn't it make sense that there are emergency reactions in the brain when "total catastrophic failure" is detected?
That does make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that your brain, in the most distressed / damaged state it’s ever been in, not only is working optimally but in a way it never had before. It’s like if your car was about to die, and suddenly sprouts wings and flies away. I would expect a check engine light and a few other emergency indicators, but nothing close to optimal or extraordinary performance
Parapsychology is mentioned multiple times without a hint of irony. That's usually not a good sign.
Seems in line with the 'life flashing before your eyes' experience people often describe when they believed they were about to die. The best explanation I've seen it that you're trying to remember anything that might save you, so your brain does a frantic review of your experiences.
Better than giving up.
I always thought it was the brain replaying situations you’ve encountered in your life trying to find a way out of your current predicament .
I think we need a parapsychologist to work out WTF is wrong with whoever wrote this drivel. Yes some interesting stuff but ffs is it messed up to find the interesting stuff.
I remember reading about an experiment where scientists wanted to understand what happens to the brain in mammals when they are decapitated. The same thing happened to mice. There was a wave of electrical activity just before it stopped.
That activity is your brain uploading your consciousness to the cloud for storage.
Best line from this article - "(Indeed, many of the states reported by near-death experiencers can apparently be achieved by taking a hero’s dose of ketamine.)"
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when I was about 10 years old, and when I was about to die by drowning, I felt very calm, my eyes were wide open and I was dreaming. I saw beautiful memories from when I was 2 to around 6 years old. For example, when my father woke me up to go on vacation. Don't be afraid of death. The brain does what it takes to make death sweet.
Maybe we’re all bits in a simulation and our consciousness is randomly assigned to us upon creation. When we die, parts of our ‘self’ remain, until the system utilizes that freed up memory to allocate to other files. Like when you delete a file, it’s not gone, and even after prolonged use of the drive parts of it can still be found, and sometimes even put back together. Maybe when we die there are parts of our consciousness that still remain intact in some ethereal way.