When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.
Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.
IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.
It's possible that they do it because they learned pathological systems of behaviour from pathological family/social experiences, but even if fighting back against them is also shitty, it beats enabling them to keep doing it (especially to you)
What you may be thinking of is research showing that when kids get to know each other, the ones who will become socially dominant tend to be aggressive early. But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer. With further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance.
The most common scenario for continued aggression is someone near the social bottom, who is attempting to reinforce that there is someone who is still firmly below them.
The study seems to use self-reported perception of being a bully as the main metric. They didn't even bother making the children rate each other.
> But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer
This sounds to me that their (unprovoked) aggression worked and that counter-aggression should have been encouraged earlier to make it a less viable strategy.
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This also does not describe any kind of bullying I've seen or heard about. It was always those with a high social status, usually a group, though often with a clear leader, targeting one or two children with a low social status.
Some of this bullying was not even driven by the need to gain social status but simple pleasure - see my other comments - pleasure/amusement/entertainment is a major reason for bullying.
I've literally never seen a low-social status child bully a high-social status one. How would that even work? Wouldn't the supposed target be defended by his group?
a) Either there is no objective morality and then anyone can do anything they can justify using their personal moral system, as long as it's internally consistent (it blatantly isn't for most people and perhaps subtly isn't for the rest)
b) or there is objective morality and then anyone can dispense punishment (for example by fighting back) because there's no reason the objective morality would favor a given person over any other.
The idea that people should not solve their own problems or other people's problems stems from:
- People in positions of power wanting to justify their power, thus indoctrinating everyone into believing they need protection. The more authoritarian the state, the more restrictive guns laws. Authoritarian teachers demanding absolute order and children punishing each other is disorder.
- The difficulty of ascertaining who the original aggressor is and who is just fighting back.
- The likelihood of people making mistakes and punishing the wrong person of overshooting the level of appropriate punishment.
- Internal conflict weakening the whole groups, making it more susceptible to outside aggression - better to punish both sides fighting to keep order and appear strong.
All of these have some merit in some situations and to some extent but IMO none of them justify their logical conclusion - total submission to a supposedly unerring position of power.
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But back to fighting back:
I've seen two groups of children - those who were encouraged to fight back and those who were encouraged to endure it or ask teachers for help.
You don't see the first group bullied much so you might not even identify the group as a target of (potential) bullying.
Meanwhile I have never seen the second group's strategy working out - the bullying always escalated until a breaking point.
Additionally, from what I've seen, when the second group changed strategies to fighting back, the bullying stopped.
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Finally, another pattern I see emerging from personal experience is that the parents of the children involved often know each other because they went to school with each other, even if not necessarily one class. And the parents of aggressors ("bullies") behaved the same way. The behavior absolutely is transmissible and I don't believe it's solely through social means. Some anti-social personality traits have a large genetic component and these traits are often a major cause of the need to hurt others.
This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research.
Closely related, corporal punishment results in kids who are more likely to try to get their way through violence. Though they'll also take care not to be caught doing so. This is one of the big reasons why psychologists argue against using corporal punishment.
Fighting back worked a hell of a lot better than anything the "responsible" adults could ever suggest. School teachers, councilors, my mother, etc, all gave useless advice. My dad told me to fight back. When I finally listened to him, that's when the bullying stopped. I lost that fight, but won the war so to speak.
Telling kids not to fight back is a terrible cowardly thing to do, the adults who do that are either oblivious idealists or are just cynically covering their own ass because they don't want to get in trouble for encouraging a confrontation.
Bullying is unrelated to corporal punishment - Self-defence is ok.
Please do not conflate those two things.
If a bully has never felt what they dish out, they may not like it.
Self-defence is ok.
For the young people in my life, I always advise to not escalate, be clear it's not ok, seek an adult's help, and if all reasonable attempts have failed, it's a-ok to stand up for yourself and neutralize a threat when the people and systems around you aren't.
I don't condone violence. But I also see we live in a world where the world fights to force it's way on others.
I take massive grains of salt on such opinions someone is from a group more likely to be a bully or not.
I do believe there's a difference where the punishment comes from.
Aggressors[0] generally attack others one of or a combination of these reasons:
1) Pleasure/amusement/entertainment. Some people simply enjoy seeing others (everyone, specific subgroups or specific individuals) suffer.
2) Personal benefit/gain. Very often this is simply social status among peers. As aggressors grow, they refine these strategies (both consciously and unconsciously) to also gain social status in the eyes of people in positions of power (e.g. superiors/supervisors/managers), often with a resulting material benefit. Sometimes the material benefit is more direct - e.g. scammers.
A) If the punishment comes from people in positions of power:
With reason 1) it offsets the pleasure they get but quick corporal punishment is probably less effective than longer punishments such as exclusion from activities or having to perform laborious tasks.
However, with reason 2) any punishment, corporal or not, creates or reinforces a persecution complex (after all, they are just doing what they think everyone should be doing - climbing the social ladder) and often even helps them gain status because they are doing what their peers secretly also want to do - break the rules and stick it to the people in positions of power.
B) If the punishment comes from peers or especially the target, it defeats both reasons. Very few aggressors get pleasure from betting beat up by their target or other peers. And with reason 2 especially, they now risk losing social status if the target wins or it's a signal that this the behavior is not accepted by the group if it comes from peers.
The issue with B often is that to onlookers who don't know how it started, it looks like 2 people fighting, instead of one being the aggressor and the other being the target mounting a successful defense. But that can be solved through better education of people in positions of power.
What I find especially concerning are all these zero tolerance policies which actively encourage people to not defend others and sometimes even themselves.
[0]: I generally don't call them bullies because that conjures an image of children in a schoolyard but these people grow up to become adults and their behavior is driven by the same urges and incentives, it just manifests slightly differently. Being an aggressor is a mentality and a personality trait.
its bad science. I can name zero times when the victim reacting with aggression in an effective way (i.e. hurting or shaming the bully) did not result in better behavior from the aggressor in the following confrontations. I have worked with children and adolescents a lot of years and people standing up for themselves are usually better off.
Now, there are some side notes:
the standing up must be timely and appropriate. The revenge shouldnt be served cold and the revenge shouldn't raise sympathy for the bully.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
The exact same can be said for good ole Adi. And many of his ilk currently alive.
What you're saying isn't a straightforward universal truth. There's no one right answer. Some of the time, what you're saying is very true. Other times it's very much not. GP's reaction as such isn't "knee-jerk". The equation doesn't suddenly change the second the "evildoer" in question turns 18, or 21.
Most bullies just vent out what they suffer at home, school or workplace. They already punish themselves by not reacting against the real source of their problems.
A valid rationalization but never an excuse. At some point the buck has to stop being passed around. Standing up to all instances of violence is the only way to stop the endless cycles.
I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away.
However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.
I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.
For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing.
I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.
Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
> Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning.
Same. I was put under twice and both times it was like someone flipping a switch from conscious to unconscious. When I woke up it was like nothing happened save for a slight groggy feeling. It was not like sleep where you feel rested, as if you lost time.
edit: to add when going under the first time I was laying down on the operating table as the anesthesiologist made small talk with a nurse I suddenly felt super high while the room started to spin - POOF out.
Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually.
And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking.
The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma.
The modern implementation is to use general anesthesia as little as necessary as it has numerous side-effects. Local anesthesia with improved selectivity is used if possible.
Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep.
Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement.
Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
General anesthetics is definitely one of the weirder parts of medicine. It seems to have developed mostly by trial and error over hundreds of years, but it has obvious huge benefits. Imagine any kind of internal surgery being attempted without it!
Do you know how that usually applies to people with addiction problems who elect not to receive anesthesia? Do they generally receive everything except the pain killers?
> you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
In that case, they don’t seem to work that well for me. Or maybe they do it differently here.
I always remember going into the OR and being prepped.
My anxiety for my last surgery was huge up until the moment I passed up. The best I got was the anaesthesist telling me it was normal for someone in my circumstances (I’d not had anxiety the last few times, so was very confused as to why I had so much this time, I was freaking for some reason)
My first time I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backwards from 100. I assumed the process would take 30 to 60 seconds. I don't think I even hit 97..
On (In?) my last surgery they did the "make sure to remember what you dream" spiel on me. I dreamt I was having a surgery. After the surgery no one came to ask me what I've dreamt, it left me feeling quite a bit disappointed.
It’s generally very quick, but I suppose not perfect as on one occasion, they had to give me some additional kind of injection because for some reason, I was still awake. The guy doing it seemed confused.
With whatever he did additionally, as he did it he goes:
“Let’s try this again, start counting back from 10”
I might have made it to 9 the second time around.
Does this mean they messed up the dosage or something? I’ve had the same guy since and it’s never happened again.
It's possible he messed up the dosage. What he gave you wasn't good anymore. Or something else I'm not even thinking of.
The fact that he gave you something else that time, and that you've never had that experience again would make me believe he thought it was a fault in the product he initially gave you.
Had the same experience, what scared the crap out of me is that feeling of not even knowing you're out is how some people spend their last moment.
Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while
Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
"With effortless focus, Munenori Sensei smoothly pulls the arrow
to bend his bow. Released like a ripe fruit, the arrow glides.
It races toward your heart.
In the eternity of the arrow’s flight, you wonder: What is this
present moment?
Confronting its end, your mind becomes razor sharp, cleav-
ing time into uncountable, quickly passing moments.
At one such perfect instant you see the arrow as it floats, suspended
between the finest ticks of the most precise clock. In this instant
of no time, the arrow has no motion, and nothing pushes or
pulls it toward your heart.
How, then, does it move?
While your beginner’s mind embraces the mystery, the arrow flies."
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
I once lost consciousness after a bad bike wreck that left me bleeding significantly from both knees. I lost consciousness while sitting on a bench waiting for my wife to arrive after walking my bike back to the trail head.
I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench.
The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again.
Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.
I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.
I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.
I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.
Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years.
I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal.
Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up.
As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.
I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.
It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”
They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.
“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”
(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)
Given that we don't really have a precise definition of "alive", it should not be surprising that we are unable to tell the precise moment a person dies.
I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.
I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
I'd sign up for this without a second's hesitation. I actually had the thought of "how could I volunteer?" while reading the article. My personal primum mobile is learning - I'm curious (to some extent) about (nearly) everything - and along with that goes an urge to help satisfy other people's curiosity.
I'm curious about my death, too! I've sat with people who are very close to that edge, and I realize it's the last experience I'll ever have, the last lesson I'll ever learn, and find it poignant that I won't be able to tell anyone else about it. Being part of an experiment like this would be... satisfying, somehow. It feels like it would give meaning to my death.
I respect that you have a different point of view, but I hope that helps you understand what would motivate someone to do something like this.
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I don’t see any reason why this would have to be an uncomfortable experience. A study with this kind of potential could easily get funding to relocate necessary equipment to a home or chosen location (assuming the participant is able to die outside hospital), and once the equipment is set up and running it’s unlikely that operators would even need to be present.
Why do people write wills? Why do people leave messages for their loved ones before they die? Why do people donate organs?
Because they care about leaving behind an impact after they die. I don't think it would be for everyone, but there surely be some people who would want to do this.
Given I’m going to die anyway, I’d readily do it. How else will we increase our understanding of the brain’s experience of dying? And it seems that even beyond the mere understanding, we might be able to prepare for and manage short-term care of imminent organ donors as just one concrete case.
Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.
What a weird way of phrasing that.
The whole point of ethics in multiple disciplines is to try and study the principles of humanity in the society we've formed. The areas of philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion are filled with centuries of discussions trying to argue and explain a lot of these matters.
But the philosopher of the Internet of today, instead of curiosity of reasoning and arguing for what should change in deontology, and why; sums it up as "ethicists forbid...".
I'd really like to understand your views better on what should change and why...
Especially when there's plenty of ignoring of ethics in today's world!
The centuries of ethics discussions have nothing to do with the current institutions that gatekeep science and health with worries and trivia, any more than philosophers of nature are responsible for enviromentalists not letting us build housing. I'm entirely referring to anti-growth bureaucrats. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/highlights-from-the-co...
Ethicists seem worse for the world than actually unethical people because they bind the majority of good people from progressing, which is what gets us out ahead of our baser natures.
I believe that many of the criticisms are either naive or intentionally ignore the importance of ethical oversight in research. The existence of these processes ensures that research is conducted with rigor and thought, which is crucial for maintaining high standards. Some examples suggest they aim at those high standards, and yet fail to see the value on these.
These applications allow you to dissect, discuss and reason about every presumption you had coming in, how you handle people's data with care, understand the risks and be prepared for anything.
They help both you and your participants. Help you not be an idiot, help you to grow and question your own procedures, and ultimately help you write the damn paper as you have clearly given the matter enough thought at that point. You need to prove yourself, and that is a good thing.
Without ethics, other motivations inevitably end up undermining any good intentions an experimenter may have. Ethics are the "laws" of science that constrain us for the sake of all. Your opinions here reflect a Libertarian bent, I bet.
I have been unable to find the article since—I think it must have been Scientific American. Perhaps in the 1980s.
In any event, it described training a neural network, perhaps it was number recognition. The author said that when they "destroyed" the network it began to have "flashbacks" that resembled early training sessions.
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
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).
If your perception of time is distorted in those last moments, perhaps you live another thousand or million years in what was your life in what was only a few seconds for the people watching you die. After this thousand or however many years you experienced, you are ready for the experience to be over.
Now what happens to people who are shot directly in the head with a gun? Or have their brain otherwise abruptly massively damaged.
Some hypothesize that flashbacks might be the brain searching for relevant useful memories, or hallucinating if it can’t find any. Or, perhaps emotions or physical issues cause your brain to function differently and it’s not an adaptive trait.
Time slowing down does seem useful in the event you can actually affect your circumstances.
I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.
Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.
Hmm is it worth the read?
edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of
Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for
worthwhile reading
I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.
I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).
But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.
And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.
I was reading the comments trying to find something similar to this. I remember reading a similar explanation. The brain in a ultimate attempt of solving that fatal situation goes deeply thought memories to find anything that could help. Evolutionarily, this would make sense.
Finding the article is a good case for AI chats, particularly ones with the direct links from the web in the answer. I tried perplexity and google ai mode, both failed
What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about?
If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience.
However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..
Are there any software engineers here that believe in the afterlife?
When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.
I'm sorry that happened to you. That's so horrible. Wanna make me beat up bullies, man. Got damn bullies.
Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.
IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.
It's possible that they do it because they learned pathological systems of behaviour from pathological family/social experiences, but even if fighting back against them is also shitty, it beats enabling them to keep doing it (especially to you)
No, that is absolutely not a misconception, and is backed by peer reviewed research such as https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/why-stigmatized-ado....
What you may be thinking of is research showing that when kids get to know each other, the ones who will become socially dominant tend to be aggressive early. But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer. With further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance.
The most common scenario for continued aggression is someone near the social bottom, who is attempting to reinforce that there is someone who is still firmly below them.
The study seems to use self-reported perception of being a bully as the main metric. They didn't even bother making the children rate each other.
> But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer
This sounds to me that their (unprovoked) aggression worked and that counter-aggression should have been encouraged earlier to make it a less viable strategy.
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This also does not describe any kind of bullying I've seen or heard about. It was always those with a high social status, usually a group, though often with a clear leader, targeting one or two children with a low social status.
Some of this bullying was not even driven by the need to gain social status but simple pleasure - see my other comments - pleasure/amusement/entertainment is a major reason for bullying.
I've literally never seen a low-social status child bully a high-social status one. How would that even work? Wouldn't the supposed target be defended by his group?
>IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.
pretty much any human social phenomenon can have multiple causes.
I don't think fighting back is shitty in any way.
a) Either there is no objective morality and then anyone can do anything they can justify using their personal moral system, as long as it's internally consistent (it blatantly isn't for most people and perhaps subtly isn't for the rest)
b) or there is objective morality and then anyone can dispense punishment (for example by fighting back) because there's no reason the objective morality would favor a given person over any other.
The idea that people should not solve their own problems or other people's problems stems from:
- People in positions of power wanting to justify their power, thus indoctrinating everyone into believing they need protection. The more authoritarian the state, the more restrictive guns laws. Authoritarian teachers demanding absolute order and children punishing each other is disorder.
- The difficulty of ascertaining who the original aggressor is and who is just fighting back.
- The likelihood of people making mistakes and punishing the wrong person of overshooting the level of appropriate punishment.
- Internal conflict weakening the whole groups, making it more susceptible to outside aggression - better to punish both sides fighting to keep order and appear strong.
All of these have some merit in some situations and to some extent but IMO none of them justify their logical conclusion - total submission to a supposedly unerring position of power.
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But back to fighting back:
I've seen two groups of children - those who were encouraged to fight back and those who were encouraged to endure it or ask teachers for help.
You don't see the first group bullied much so you might not even identify the group as a target of (potential) bullying.
Meanwhile I have never seen the second group's strategy working out - the bullying always escalated until a breaking point.
Additionally, from what I've seen, when the second group changed strategies to fighting back, the bullying stopped.
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Finally, another pattern I see emerging from personal experience is that the parents of the children involved often know each other because they went to school with each other, even if not necessarily one class. And the parents of aggressors ("bullies") behaved the same way. The behavior absolutely is transmissible and I don't believe it's solely through social means. Some anti-social personality traits have a large genetic component and these traits are often a major cause of the need to hurt others.
Social mean girl bullies maybe. A guy who chokes a 15 yr old til they lose consciousness is not trying to climb the social ladder though
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I don't agree. Most of the bullies I dealt with growing up were privileged shits who had never had anyone cut them down a notch.
> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line
oh you need to convince them that more beatings would be forthcoming if they step out of line again.
This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research.
Closely related, corporal punishment results in kids who are more likely to try to get their way through violence. Though they'll also take care not to be caught doing so. This is one of the big reasons why psychologists argue against using corporal punishment.
Fighting back worked a hell of a lot better than anything the "responsible" adults could ever suggest. School teachers, councilors, my mother, etc, all gave useless advice. My dad told me to fight back. When I finally listened to him, that's when the bullying stopped. I lost that fight, but won the war so to speak.
Telling kids not to fight back is a terrible cowardly thing to do, the adults who do that are either oblivious idealists or are just cynically covering their own ass because they don't want to get in trouble for encouraging a confrontation.
Bullying is unrelated to corporal punishment - Self-defence is ok.
Please do not conflate those two things.
If a bully has never felt what they dish out, they may not like it.
Self-defence is ok.
For the young people in my life, I always advise to not escalate, be clear it's not ok, seek an adult's help, and if all reasonable attempts have failed, it's a-ok to stand up for yourself and neutralize a threat when the people and systems around you aren't.
I don't condone violence. But I also see we live in a world where the world fights to force it's way on others.
I take massive grains of salt on such opinions someone is from a group more likely to be a bully or not.
> This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research
Anecdotally, it worked for me :shrug:
I do believe there's a difference where the punishment comes from.
Aggressors[0] generally attack others one of or a combination of these reasons:
1) Pleasure/amusement/entertainment. Some people simply enjoy seeing others (everyone, specific subgroups or specific individuals) suffer.
2) Personal benefit/gain. Very often this is simply social status among peers. As aggressors grow, they refine these strategies (both consciously and unconsciously) to also gain social status in the eyes of people in positions of power (e.g. superiors/supervisors/managers), often with a resulting material benefit. Sometimes the material benefit is more direct - e.g. scammers.
A) If the punishment comes from people in positions of power:
With reason 1) it offsets the pleasure they get but quick corporal punishment is probably less effective than longer punishments such as exclusion from activities or having to perform laborious tasks.
However, with reason 2) any punishment, corporal or not, creates or reinforces a persecution complex (after all, they are just doing what they think everyone should be doing - climbing the social ladder) and often even helps them gain status because they are doing what their peers secretly also want to do - break the rules and stick it to the people in positions of power.
B) If the punishment comes from peers or especially the target, it defeats both reasons. Very few aggressors get pleasure from betting beat up by their target or other peers. And with reason 2 especially, they now risk losing social status if the target wins or it's a signal that this the behavior is not accepted by the group if it comes from peers.
The issue with B often is that to onlookers who don't know how it started, it looks like 2 people fighting, instead of one being the aggressor and the other being the target mounting a successful defense. But that can be solved through better education of people in positions of power.
What I find especially concerning are all these zero tolerance policies which actively encourage people to not defend others and sometimes even themselves.
[0]: I generally don't call them bullies because that conjures an image of children in a schoolyard but these people grow up to become adults and their behavior is driven by the same urges and incentives, it just manifests slightly differently. Being an aggressor is a mentality and a personality trait.
its bad science. I can name zero times when the victim reacting with aggression in an effective way (i.e. hurting or shaming the bully) did not result in better behavior from the aggressor in the following confrontations. I have worked with children and adolescents a lot of years and people standing up for themselves are usually better off.
Now, there are some side notes: the standing up must be timely and appropriate. The revenge shouldnt be served cold and the revenge shouldn't raise sympathy for the bully.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.
The exact same can be said for good ole Adi. And many of his ilk currently alive.
What you're saying isn't a straightforward universal truth. There's no one right answer. Some of the time, what you're saying is very true. Other times it's very much not. GP's reaction as such isn't "knee-jerk". The equation doesn't suddenly change the second the "evildoer" in question turns 18, or 21.
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Most bullies just vent out what they suffer at home, school or workplace. They already punish themselves by not reacting against the real source of their problems.
A valid rationalization but never an excuse. At some point the buck has to stop being passed around. Standing up to all instances of violence is the only way to stop the endless cycles.
My brother picked me up by the neck once. I still have nightmares about it. Kids are so insanely cruel.
I have lost consciousness several times in my life. Not a pleasurable experience specially as last time I did it because of such extreme pain that I thought I was passing away.
However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.
I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.
For contrast, when I was put under with propofol for surgery, there was nothing.
I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.
Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
> Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning.
Same. I was put under twice and both times it was like someone flipping a switch from conscious to unconscious. When I woke up it was like nothing happened save for a slight groggy feeling. It was not like sleep where you feel rested, as if you lost time.
edit: to add when going under the first time I was laying down on the operating table as the anesthesiologist made small talk with a nurse I suddenly felt super high while the room started to spin - POOF out.
Anesthetics are very weird though. There's still a lot we don't know about how they work. They seem to act like you experienced, complete shutdown, for most people, which seems different from the states that people go into when unconscious or are near death usually.
And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
I had heard something unsettling about anesthesia that I could use verification or debunking.
The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma.
Is that accurate?
Partly correct.
The modern implementation is to use general anesthesia as little as necessary as it has numerous side-effects. Local anesthesia with improved selectivity is used if possible.
No, it's just a creepypasta.
Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep.
Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement.
Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
General anesthetics is definitely one of the weirder parts of medicine. It seems to have developed mostly by trial and error over hundreds of years, but it has obvious huge benefits. Imagine any kind of internal surgery being attempted without it!
Do you know how that usually applies to people with addiction problems who elect not to receive anesthesia? Do they generally receive everything except the pain killers?
Yup!
Luckily, opioids can be swapped for other medications that are less effective, like high dose NSAIDs. There's also local anesthetics for some stuff.
> you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
In that case, they don’t seem to work that well for me. Or maybe they do it differently here.
I always remember going into the OR and being prepped.
My anxiety for my last surgery was huge up until the moment I passed up. The best I got was the anaesthesist telling me it was normal for someone in my circumstances (I’d not had anxiety the last few times, so was very confused as to why I had so much this time, I was freaking for some reason)
No. As an aside, when you are younger they may elect to put you into a twilight level of sedation.
And that is how I saw the inside of my own beating heart at 10 while I was tied down and essentially naked in front of like 10+ adults.
Oh, and the contrast dye momentarily made me feel like I was being burnt alive from the inside out.
My wife had this done when doing a biopsy, IIRC, and it scarred here / gave her PTSD for years..
She now insists on full sedation.
My first time I remember the anesthesiologist asking me to count backwards from 100. I assumed the process would take 30 to 60 seconds. I don't think I even hit 97..
Yeah, mine was count down from ten. Made it to eight, then I was in a different room and an hour had passed. Closest thing to time travel.
On (In?) my last surgery they did the "make sure to remember what you dream" spiel on me. I dreamt I was having a surgery. After the surgery no one came to ask me what I've dreamt, it left me feeling quite a bit disappointed.
Yeah, people think they can "fight" it, but you can't. That stuff will knock you out. The counting is just so they know when you're out.
It’s generally very quick, but I suppose not perfect as on one occasion, they had to give me some additional kind of injection because for some reason, I was still awake. The guy doing it seemed confused.
With whatever he did additionally, as he did it he goes:
“Let’s try this again, start counting back from 10”
I might have made it to 9 the second time around.
Does this mean they messed up the dosage or something? I’ve had the same guy since and it’s never happened again.
It's possible he messed up the dosage. What he gave you wasn't good anymore. Or something else I'm not even thinking of.
The fact that he gave you something else that time, and that you've never had that experience again would make me believe he thought it was a fault in the product he initially gave you.
Had the same experience, what scared the crap out of me is that feeling of not even knowing you're out is how some people spend their last moment.
Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while
For me it gave me some peace about death. Say you are vaporized by a nuke. You're walking around chatting one moment, and there is no next moment.
I'm guessing being properly flattened by a truck is similar, though of course that's adjacent to being severely injured and dying later.
Honestly it doesn’t sound too bad to me. Just blinking out of existence. No pain, no regret. So what’s there to be scared of?
Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
"With effortless focus, Munenori Sensei smoothly pulls the arrow to bend his bow. Released like a ripe fruit, the arrow glides. It races toward your heart.
In the eternity of the arrow’s flight, you wonder: What is this present moment? Confronting its end, your mind becomes razor sharp, cleav- ing time into uncountable, quickly passing moments.
At one such perfect instant you see the arrow as it floats, suspended between the finest ticks of the most precise clock. In this instant of no time, the arrow has no motion, and nothing pushes or pulls it toward your heart. How, then, does it move?
While your beginner’s mind embraces the mystery, the arrow flies."
Had a similar incident in my teens.
I was at scouts and we’d set up a monkey swing on a branch next to a river.
While I was on it, I somehow realised the knot on the branch was coming undone and was able to witness its unravelling in slow motion.
The fall was also slow, as I hit the ground I cried out, but more from shock than any pain.
Very luckily I had landed on the soft sandy riverbank rather than the rocks in the river I had been above just moments before.
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
I once lost consciousness after a bad bike wreck that left me bleeding significantly from both knees. I lost consciousness while sitting on a bench waiting for my wife to arrive after walking my bike back to the trail head.
I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench.
The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again.
Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.
I once had my life threatened and experiences that too - the (past) life flashing before your eyes. My thought was the brain was desperately trying to find a way out of the situation by searching for anything similar it had experienced. Was really interesting to experience.
agree with this; fits with how the brain values recording of memories when adrenaline is present
I had similar expirience. Time slowed down like 500x, and I had dream like visions and flashbacks - all within 1,2 seconds before hitting the ground.
From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.
I passed out in the gym doing a set of deadlifts. I remember setting the bar down and then I was on the floor next to it. Was just a few moments. No flashbacks or anything, just momentary oxygen depletion.
"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.
I've also lost it, around ~10 times so far. Never have any dreams or flashbacks. Just before passing out, I realize what's going to happen, but it's often too late. I only have a terrible headache afterwards.
10 times? Wow.. That seems like a lot.. AFAIK, even once is indication of potentially serious trauma.
Depends on the source. I've been doing nogi BJJ (not on the comp team: I am old, we train hard but not competition hard) about ten years or so.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I've passed out about that many times in my life as well. I'm very sensitive to dehydration and it can sneak up on me and drop my blood pressure enough that down I go. Happens maybe once every five to six years.
I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal.
Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
So is it similar to dreaming?
Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?
Part of it has to do with the memories, which gradually gets overtaken by the voices of my wife, doctor or whomever was trying to wake me up.
As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.
I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
Very interesting thanks for sharing. And also a bit scary. It seems like you have found ways to live with this condition.
I’ve had similar experiences.
In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.
It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
Coziness was something I did not experience as my conscious losses were always triggered by highly stressful situations (pain, fear). For me it was extremely overwhelming, as if my brain was on overdrive.
I got knocked off my bike about 20 years ago and was unconcious long enough that an ambulance had arrived.
I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.
huh I guess movies got that part right. I wonder what was the first movie with a scene like this
FTA: “When is exactly the time when we die? We may have tapped the door open now to start a discussion about that exact time onset”
They must not have been paying attention during their studies. That discussion has certainly been going on ever since we managed to restart a human’s heartbeat. Philosophers likely have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia, before that.
Modern medicine definitely doesn’t use “has no heartbeat == is dead”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_death#Medical_declaratio... adds “irreversible” to the definition:
“Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death)”
(And, of course, “irreversible” changes as science progresses)
Also the question is incorrect. There isn't an exact time when someone dies.
Given that we don't really have a precise definition of "alive", it should not be surprising that we are unable to tell the precise moment a person dies.
Miracle Max gave us a clear definition if I recall, you die when you are "all dead", as long as you are mostly dead, you are slightly alive...
I'll let myself out now.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/ibpdNqrtar0
I’m sure there would be a long line of willing terminal and euthanasia patients who would join a study to record their final moments, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet.
I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.
Must be a wild experience to be hooked up to a bunch of test machines while dying on schedule.
I went out to a loop choke once in BJJ. I wasn’t out long, but I wondered after if that’s what death is like - a flash of thought and that’s it.
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
https://youtu.be/ET71mabgEuM
I'd sign up for this without a second's hesitation. I actually had the thought of "how could I volunteer?" while reading the article. My personal primum mobile is learning - I'm curious (to some extent) about (nearly) everything - and along with that goes an urge to help satisfy other people's curiosity.
I'm curious about my death, too! I've sat with people who are very close to that edge, and I realize it's the last experience I'll ever have, the last lesson I'll ever learn, and find it poignant that I won't be able to tell anyone else about it. Being part of an experiment like this would be... satisfying, somehow. It feels like it would give meaning to my death.
I respect that you have a different point of view, but I hope that helps you understand what would motivate someone to do something like this.
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I don’t see any reason why this would have to be an uncomfortable experience. A study with this kind of potential could easily get funding to relocate necessary equipment to a home or chosen location (assuming the participant is able to die outside hospital), and once the equipment is set up and running it’s unlikely that operators would even need to be present.
Why do people write wills? Why do people leave messages for their loved ones before they die? Why do people donate organs?
Because they care about leaving behind an impact after they die. I don't think it would be for everyone, but there surely be some people who would want to do this.
I don’t think most people have the perspective that you do.
Given I’m going to die anyway, I’d readily do it. How else will we increase our understanding of the brain’s experience of dying? And it seems that even beyond the mere understanding, we might be able to prepare for and manage short-term care of imminent organ donors as just one concrete case.
> Science can fuck off
not all of it, presumably, if you want to express your distaste on the magical glass slab and you want pain killers on your way out.
"Science can fuck off" - reminded me of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. I a good way :)
Lmao. "After you're dead, let us know how it went."
This reminds me about the movie "Flatliners"[0] in my need-to-watch queue. Maybe this weekend.
[0]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/?ref_=fn_t_2
Ethicists forbid studying anything interesting, leaving us to scrape up data from natural experiments like this patient having a heart attack while already hooked up to an EEG.
What a weird way of phrasing that. The whole point of ethics in multiple disciplines is to try and study the principles of humanity in the society we've formed. The areas of philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion are filled with centuries of discussions trying to argue and explain a lot of these matters.
But the philosopher of the Internet of today, instead of curiosity of reasoning and arguing for what should change in deontology, and why; sums it up as "ethicists forbid...".
I'd really like to understand your views better on what should change and why...
Especially when there's plenty of ignoring of ethics in today's world!
The centuries of ethics discussions have nothing to do with the current institutions that gatekeep science and health with worries and trivia, any more than philosophers of nature are responsible for enviromentalists not letting us build housing. I'm entirely referring to anti-growth bureaucrats. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/highlights-from-the-co...
Ethicists seem worse for the world than actually unethical people because they bind the majority of good people from progressing, which is what gets us out ahead of our baser natures.
I believe that many of the criticisms are either naive or intentionally ignore the importance of ethical oversight in research. The existence of these processes ensures that research is conducted with rigor and thought, which is crucial for maintaining high standards. Some examples suggest they aim at those high standards, and yet fail to see the value on these.
These applications allow you to dissect, discuss and reason about every presumption you had coming in, how you handle people's data with care, understand the risks and be prepared for anything.
They help both you and your participants. Help you not be an idiot, help you to grow and question your own procedures, and ultimately help you write the damn paper as you have clearly given the matter enough thought at that point. You need to prove yourself, and that is a good thing.
Without ethics, other motivations inevitably end up undermining any good intentions an experimenter may have. Ethics are the "laws" of science that constrain us for the sake of all. Your opinions here reflect a Libertarian bent, I bet.
If we were to abolish ethics in research, would you volunteer to be experimented on without bounds?
I have been unable to find the article since—I think it must have been Scientific American. Perhaps in the 1980s.
In any event, it described training a neural network, perhaps it was number recognition. The author said that when they "destroyed" the network it began to have "flashbacks" that resembled early training sessions.
That always stuck with me.
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
This is giving me "Brainstorm" vibes.
If you haven't watched the movie, now would be a good time.
Just rewatched it on Laserdisc last month (era-appropriate and all) :)
The computer effects are amazing (especially considering it was made in 1983), the concept is very interesting, the acting is a bit odd, and... Natalie Wood sadly died during production (her sister stepped in to help complete the movie).
Her death was even more mysterious https://people.com/natalie-wood-death-legacy-what-to-know-86...
Just watched a podcast on this. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mysterious-death-o...
Thanks for sharing this gem.
If your perception of time is distorted in those last moments, perhaps you live another thousand or million years in what was your life in what was only a few seconds for the people watching you die. After this thousand or however many years you experienced, you are ready for the experience to be over.
Now what happens to people who are shot directly in the head with a gun? Or have their brain otherwise abruptly massively damaged.
The new dan brown book uses this as a central concept in the story
It's kind of the central concept of the 1990 movie Flatliners as well.
Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.
Can't think of a way that brains doing this is adaptive in an evolutionary sense.
Some hypothesize that flashbacks might be the brain searching for relevant useful memories, or hallucinating if it can’t find any. Or, perhaps emotions or physical issues cause your brain to function differently and it’s not an adaptive trait.
Time slowing down does seem useful in the event you can actually affect your circumstances.
I developed epilepsy a few years ago and each of the two times I had a waking tonic clonic aka “Grand Mal” it felt like they describe the brain when it’s dying.
It’s the closest thing I’ve heard people describe as dying so it can be profound.
Incidentally my neurologist said that she had patients that don’t stop their seizures because they feel like they areare mystical or part of their mental work. That’s a wild thought to me given the risks, but I can understand it, given how you feel on the other side.
> they areare mystical or part of their mental work.
In ancient Greece, epilepsy was called the "holy disease" and it was believed that gods speak through the patient during a seizure.
Without spoiling too much, this is a major theme in Dan Brown's latest novel 'the secret of secrets'.
Hmm is it worth the read? edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for worthwhile reading
I added it to my reading list!
Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes Epilepsy and God - Part 1
https://youtu.be/qIiIsDIkDtg?si=bIjpz5mWHEbN_NDI
what was it like for you
I got electructed when I was 19 while trying to kick a colleague who was fused to an industrial distribution cabinet away from it. I was dead for 7-8 minutes and had these flashbacks. They were fast and felt more like drifting from one dream to another. Can't recommend though got visual cortex hyperactivity with a bad case of visual snow syndrome and tinnitus ever since.
I presume your colleague was dead for more than 7-8 minutes... That was gallant of you.
A dataset of one (1), eh? And epileptic to boot.
It always starts with 1 :)
I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).
But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.
And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.
I was reading the comments trying to find something similar to this. I remember reading a similar explanation. The brain in a ultimate attempt of solving that fatal situation goes deeply thought memories to find anything that could help. Evolutionarily, this would make sense.
Wouldn't your life flash before your eyes on every new bad event then? Like your first cut?
I guess the example I gave was a bit dumb.
A good example of what we call a "just so" theory.
Finding the article is a good case for AI chats, particularly ones with the direct links from the web in the answer. I tried perplexity and google ai mode, both failed
Could you share the link to that article?
Sorry, but it is something I read a while back. If I find it again and don't forget, I will share.
Maybe you just need the proper threat? :-)
I always figured it's cerebral death spasms which will cause experiences encoded to those patterns or neurons.
What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about? If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience. However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..
Interesting. I am no expert but this might be related to photonic luminiscent emission while on stress as it happens with almost every living being.
You mean light? How is this related to regular emission of light?
https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/the-secret-glow-of-life-how... this
It is the brain uploading it's memories to the afterlife.
imagine your life is flashing before your eyes and you're remembering reading this comment
Thanks a lot, goopypoop, I hate it.
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