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- Hacker News
- “””What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries.”””
Centuries?
by fnordpiglet - Arguably there werent neuroscientists 1000 years agoby dmbche
- This is giving me "Brainstorm" vibes.
If you haven't watched the movie, now would be a good time.
by karlkloss - Thanks for sharing this gem.by artur_makly
- Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)
The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).
by andrehacker - In the 90s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman proposed in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule that large quantities of DMT (an endogenous psychoactive substance), are released into the brain upon death. I don't know that we have any clear evidence of this, but its certainly an interesting perspective on what might account for near death, and death experiences.by squidsoup
- The interesting thing about DMT is that it’s an ego-stripper. You have no sense of self. You are non-corporeal. Time and space are irrelevant.
People who have taken DMT find it very difficult to explain what the visions mean when they flash before your eyes. “Flash” in the sense that they are so fast and from every conceivable direction simultaneously and you can see in all directions. And beautifully purple.
Since we are beings that have a conscious “self”, we attribute these moving images to “our lives flashing before our eyes”, but I believe that to be our egotistical selves applying that after the fact.
I now believe that the human brain acts as a filter to a raw stream of collective human shared consciousness, normally out of our grasp.
What people see there is a short temporary window into everyone else’s exact same moment in time.
It’s like a back door hack into god’s admin console and you get to watch the interconnected consciousness of human existence in real time for a few minutes.
However our brains aren’t meant to run unfiltered. Our brains usually optimize and filter as much as they can to conserve energy. We notice the differences and not the usual. Our brains fill in gaps. Eventually the brain overloads as the trip runs to an end and everything goes black. A complete void overwhelms you.
The brain finally reboots and coming back is like watching an old Linux machine reboot, loading its kernel and drivers before adding the OS layers.
First you question what you are, before then discovering who you are. It’s like a process of birth but coming out of hibernation mode for fast boot.
Maybe death is the same. Returning to the collective consciousness.
Like the ant that cannot comprehend the existence of the universe or the neuron that only understands its nearest neighbors, maybe there exists a plane above human individuals as an analogy to the neuron or the ant, that we too cannot not perceive nor understand, because our brains are too small to comprehend it. Only for those fleeting moments when we overclock the system.
by junto - Traumatic events, like NDEs, tend to come with lots of adrenaline, stress hormones, and a cocktail of neurotransmitters that could have the secondary consequence of slowing overall monoamine oxidation, similar to MAOIs, resulting in longer effective exposure to any chemicals like DMT that would normally be transient.
You at most have around 250 μg in your system, you need at least 40 times that to get to the lower threshold of a psychedelic effect. If other factors are in play, and it doesn't get immediately metabolized because of everything else consuming the MAO supply, then it's plausible that there could be an effect.
If that were the case, then you're looking at a potential last-ditch survival mechanism, reinforcing the experience and "fuzzing" the memory for maximum impact.
- Relevant here is the relatively unknown(by modern standards) Hugo Award winner The Terminal Experiment by Robert Sawyer.
Man invents a high resolution brain scanner and is able to identify the exact moment of death. Book largely explores the implications of that and the existence of this tech, all wrapped up with a murder mystery.
Not the best cyberpunk I’ve ever read but a solid read if you find this premise interesting.
- But as the person had epilepsy, which happens as a result of "abnormal electrical brain activity", I wonder how general those results are. I'm surprised this hasn't been done on a 'healthy' patient
- I usually discard studies with sample sizes of 1by Quitschquat
- > On the spiritual side, I think it is somewhat calming. I face this at times when you have patients that pass away and you talk their families; you have to be the bearer of bad news. Right now, we don't know anything about what happens to their loved one’s brain when they're dying. I think if we know that there is something happening in their brain, that they are remembering nice moments, we can tell these families and it builds a feeling of warmth that in that moment when they are falling, this can help a little bit to catch them.
I do not see any connection between this and spirituality. I also see no reason to think that they must be remembering nice moments. It is possible to be remembering painful moments. This seems especially likely in cases of PTSD.
by ryao - It's just a byproduct of needing to be syndicated at a University in Kentuckyby yieldcrv
- Spiritual perhaps in that it satisfies a need that cannot be provided by material comforts or by the mere intellectualising of it?by aeonfox
- I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.
- I presume your colleague was dead for more than 7-8 minutes... That was gallant of you.by djmips
- I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.
Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.
- what was it like for youby baddash
- Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes Epilepsy and God - Part 1
- Without spoiling too much, this is a major theme in Dan Brown's latest novel 'the secret of secrets'.by mahrain
- > they areare mystical or part of their mental work.
In ancient Greece, epilepsy was called the "holy disease" and it was believed that gods speak through the patient during a seizure.
- I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.by vermilingua
- Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.by Noumenon72
- I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.by lynx97
- Lmao. "After you're dead, let us know how it went."
- I went out to a loop choke once in BJJ. I wasn’t out long, but I wondered after if that’s what death is like - a flash of thought and that’s it.by matwood
- Must be a wild experience to be hooked up to a bunch of test machines while dying on schedule.by system2
- I agree. I read an article a few months ago about how frequent MAID (medical assistance in dying) is in Canada. I am surprised that that has not led to larger scale studies about the dying process.
In this particular case, the press release notes "Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling...". That does seem to limit how much can be generalized from this one case. A larger study of MAID patients would be more useful.
Edit: Maybe the issue is that the MAID itself would alter the brain state. That actually seems pretty plausible.
by ttcbj - I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.by Sam6late
- FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”
They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.
Modern medicine definitely doesn’t use “has no heartbeat == is dead”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_death#Medical_declaratio... adds “irreversible” to the definition:
“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”
(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)
by Someone