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 not saying you should forget it, but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.
How do you think that would work? People will just accuse you of interfering with their raising their children and that you shouldn't raise yours to be a snowflake -- not saying this is true but I can already hear their reasoning.
Maybe we should build laws to make parents more accountable, but then it's the other discussion where we are make the state police us even more and putting more power to the state.
I really don't see a way out other than to focus on other things and take care of ourselves.
Start with the simple. Don't be a bystander.
"Next time I see somebody berating a retail worker, I will defend them"
Although it usually needs to start more introspectively:
"Next time I am about to lose my temper, I will take a deep breath and consider if yelling is the best course of action or rather something less aggressive."
With children, there's something to be said about them learning to stand up for themselves; tattletales aren't something to admire. But at some point it is actually the correct course of action to interfere with children-raising, especially when it affects my children.
Dude, where I live a garbage truck worker got shot in the back the other say by a rich dude just because they got into an argument. You can't interfere and expect first that people will owe you a good response just because you intervened, and second that you will go through this unscathed.
We need to protect each other, but we need to know how to care. Sometimes what you see unraveling in front of you is the culmination of deep factors that you can't fight with enough attitude or willpower.
I know where you are coming from and I hope if I see something happen like this in front of me I'll have the courage and peace of mind to rightfully intervene, but that's not always the case and we can't hold bystanders in contempt because they chose to stay away. People are just nuts.
> but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.
I agree with this and this is why I'm an advocate of fighting back on the spot, yelling, etc, if it's someone crossing a boundary such that it'll bother you forever. Because if you hold you ground, it's over and you held your ground, nothing to be upset about again.
Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. I tried that and gotten beaten up and punished by the school for starting a fight. Multiple times. The bullies never got punished. This happened at two different schools.
I had difficulty explaining what happened due to being neurodivergent, so I was always punished. And my parents weren’t able to help me.
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 is a really good post that people should reflect on.
There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.
> There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.
The right to defend one's self is a critical requirement for freedom, and all that goes with it.
Somehow others experience shit situations without needing to self-sooth by inflicting similar pain on others.
Bullying is not a form of innocently misguided, or sympathy deserving, coping.
I think that view is best interpreted as an inaccurate but well meaning rationalization offered to bullied people, to suggest more passive karma is present than there is. Often by those uncomfortable with the pervasive element of real-politik physical negotiation throughout nature.
Bullies are cruel because they are getting something psychological and practical from the practice. Usually both. Violence exists because it is a very effective tool.
And just as easily a tool for good. Bullies’ behavior is famously responsive to people who vigorously retaliate or are strongly defended. Even to the point of genuinely respecting those strong enough to give back punishment, as well as they can take.
Bullies are also famously quick to offer their subservience to bigger bullies. Suddenly pliable “lambs” in that context, offering up their own power. These are rational choices for those that operate in the violence economy, not the flailings of broken souls.
Which makes standing up to all bullies in the world dramatically more important, than the calculus of any individual situation might seem to suggest.
Like all economic realms, norms that bend to lower the costs of applying bullying, violence, threat and fear power, only incentivize further expansion, investment and innovation.
Sometimes. I had a kid who’d get his buddies together and ambush me in the way out of school. His mom was an employee and the school staff would mysteriously not see anything involving him.
He then came at me by himself with a stick when I was walking my sister home far from school. I beat the shit out of him, broke his nose, bruised a rib and he sprained his ankle. My sister told her friends, and all of those little shits stayed away. He’s lucky - a year or two later I would have been stronger and probably hurt him pretty bad.
I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now. I’m sure the kid had problems, but it wasn’t my responsibility as a 10/11 year old to hug it out, and none of the 1980s adults seemed to give a shit.
> I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now.
As a father of five, with the youngest now in high school, my recent experience is we've moved from physical violence to using the system to bully victims.
> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up
Beating up a bully as self defence is categorically different from beating up a random bully. Neither is also necessary for the next step, which is involving authorities to establish a path to rehabiliation or incapacitation.
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.
As a kid, yes. As an adult protecting your kid, also yes. As a way to discourage bullies from bullying? Unless you are willing to escalate to jail, no. And even then it isn't that you have dissuaded them, it is that you are physically restraining them.
We can pretty reliably do better than that now. And yes, schoolyard bullying is way down from what it used to be. (A fact somewhat hidden by our calling out milder forms of bullying.)
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.
My comment has nothing to do with corporal punishment causing bullying.
I'm referring to children being left to deal with bullying directly, however it arrives inside the bully.
Whether bullying arises from home, adults at school, or otherwise is secondary.
Teachers today can often tell kids to sort it out themselves.
The strategy is to remain respectful, firmly ask for it to stop, tell an adult, and if all of those things have failed, self-defence is a last resort to the point of stopping the current and future level of bullying.
There is a reason parents put their kids into martial arts, etc.
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.
from figures in authority, yes. but in practise, bullies respond very well to a bigger bully. it's the entire basis of government - the monopoly on violence.
>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 can tell you first hand this definitely isn't true in all cases.
We had a bully at my school who constantly picked on all sorts of people. Eventually he decided to pick on one of my best friends who got sick of it and took him to the ground and punched him in the face about 15 times.
It was like a light switch - the bully became one of the chillest, nicest kids in our grade after that. He figured out pretty quickly that getting punched in the face isn't much fun and decided it was probably better to stop being a dick to everyone around him because he didn't know who the next person was that would return his shenanigans with violence.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act (...) 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
human social life is complex and such overgeneralization are almost never right
in some cases self-defense entirely fixes the problem
> We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
that is an utter nonsense, in some cases endless hugging and patting just leaves you exploited
> passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them
well, sadly sometimes violence is right or least bad solution
I've only been bullied once, so it's hard for me to really talk outside of that single time. I'm different and I've never given too many fucks about social norms or hierarchies, and I guess a bully from two grades above me took that as a sign I would be a good victim. Anyway, I knew what way he walked home, so the day after he had bullied me I hid in a bush. When he walked by I ambushed him with a stick and demanded he give me his school bagpack... I hoisted it into the school flagpole the next day... Like a total psychopath. Looking back on it, it's frigthening how few consequences there was for what was obviously way out of line. I guess the early 90ies were just a different time.
He probably had a shit life, but I never saw him bully anyone again.
Stunningly weak mentality. Not surprised to see it on display here, HN is polluted with broken dorks.
If you don't fight back you will be the victim of further abuse. If there's no countervailing force against sadistic psychopaths, they will continue their destructive behavior.
You should absolutely beat the shit out of bullies. To idly stand by out of some misguided slave morality, you permit their evil, and allow the world to become worse.
> 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.
There were times over the years I played the waiting game and got back at certain bullies.
Each time I got in a heap of trouble, but always recovered my pound of flesh.
What I find aggravating is when people turn to the "grow up, what's past is past" after they faced no consequences for their actions. Now you're the bad guy for not letting it go.
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.
Clarification: I never justified what bullies do, just giving an explanation. I should have made more explicit that punishing alone accomplishes nothing if the source of the problem isn't addressed: they just go to the next easier victim.
Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.
This is my nightmare. That me dying will feel just like my regular nightmares that I have today, which are all about common day stressful situations like not finding my partner in a crowd, or constantly chasing the same person and never catching up to them.
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.
I had a procedure recently and the description in the preparation instructions said "you won't be asleep, but you might not remember everything"
I talked to the nurse about this as I was prepping for the procedure, and he said that a recent patient talked throughout the procedure, but when he got back to his room afterwards, he asked "so when will the procedure start?"
So, I think the drugs you get might let experience everything. But the "nothing in between" might actually be memory loss, not loss of consciousness.
all this stuff is spooky and philosophically tricky.
That sounds more like fentanyl (which is widely used as anesthesia for minor surgeries). With fentanyl you'll be awake but loopy and not fully there. Propofol feels like time had an entire section removed with before and after spliced directly together.
In my personal experience for a day procedure (gastroscopy) it was fentanyl + midazolam, although on another occasion for the same procedure they added ketamine for some reason.
In the latter case I actually remember more of the procedure - although I was completely detached and thought it lasted about a minute (it was a 10-15 min procedure). In that case I can recall having the tube removed and passing out what seems like instantly.
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.
It's both. In smaller doses, anesthetics like propofol will leave you groggy but semi-awake and able to respond to commands. But you won't be able to form long term memories so you won't remember afterwards. This is "twilight sedation" and is what you usually get when you get a procedure like an endoscopy or colonscopy. You are somewhat awake so that you can help reposition yourself and stuff if they need you to.
In larger doses, propofol will completely eliminate consciousness. This is "general anesthesia" and what you get when you go in for a major surgical procedure. You are completely unresponsive to any stimuli.
There are levels in between these too. Consciousness is a spectrum.
As far as I know, propofol doesn't make you feel particularly good or block pain. It just kind of makes you go away. So in addition, at all levels of anesthesia, they also typically give you a narcotic like fentanyl so that you aren't suffering. They aren't just letting you scream in pain and then erasing the tape afterwards.
As someone who has had a couple of procedures where they pushed the fentanyl into the IV before the propofol, I can 100% assure that pain was the absolute last thing I was feeling. Hell, I was still high as a kite after the propofol wore off when I got home. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of metal recently unscrewed from my leg bones thinking about literally nothing in the world beyond, "holy fuck this eggnog is the best beverage I've ever had in my life I wish I could drink it forever".
My recent colonoscopy used fentanyl. I wasn't loopy afterwards but we did (as directed) arrange to have someone else drive me home.
All in all, I really appreciate the loss of memory formation, since the most annoying part of these procedures for me is the boredom. Just splice all that out, thanks.
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!
> 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)
To be fair, the use of midazolam is ultimately up to your healthcare professionals. It's not required and may be skipped if they think it would be harmful (age or respiratory / nervous system health) or is unnecessary (no anxiety). It's almost always given as an IV drip 10-ish minutes before wheeling you around to the OR, which is how you'd recognize if you got it. It's just a very common practice to give it by default for most people under 65-ish.
You may also require either a higher baseline dose than expected, and an onset of acute anxiety can actually affect dosing too. Both totally normal!
Either way, it's best to speak with your doctor leading up to surgery if that experience was upsetting. There's lots that can be done for dosage, supplemental medication, etc. Your comfort is important!
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?
In some cases. My first experience with my wife in an ER (there have been many!), the doc came up to us and said exactly this. They needed to reposition a broken bone so it could be put in a cast before surgery to rebuild the wrist could be scheduled. Since it would only take a few seconds, instead of anesthesia they would use a medication that would let her be aware of the process, but she would forget it almost immediately after.
That was about 20 years ago. To this day, the last thing she remembers is lying on the table and saying "OK, let's git-er-done" and the next 5-10 minutes are missing.
>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.
That's called twilight anesthesia and it's used for some procedures, not others. Usually used for stuff like wisdom teeth extraction and colonoscopies. Anything "major" and you're getting general anesthesia. You can ask what type of anesthesia you will be receiving (twilight or general).
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.
> 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.
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.
Ah thank you! That's super interesting. What an interesting job Anaesthetists have. I'm very greatful to mine, I always feel looked after when in his hands.
Humans react differently or have different tolerances, for example my teeth are very sensitive to pain and I needed extra adrenaline to fully numb it, even though I don't take drugs or have anything indicating that this would be necessary.
That's not what they usually use... but people have different reactions to novacaine, and different innervation; for dental work, there's a couple typical options for where nerves are and which nerves cover which teeth, some of which need more shots in more places.
For the GP, most likely the anesthetist put a note in the chart that they need more or different drugs to go under.
My lips and gums go numb but my teeth generally do not. I am sure it takes the edge off, but I can still feel it and it is still incredibly uncomfortable.
On the other hand, while having a tooth pulled and opting to be put under, the nurse and I were having a great laugh after because I was so awake. Apparently there are multiple drugs and whatever the first one was hit me so hard they only have me a half dose of another. It was enough though. They said count, I hit nine, and I woke up somewhere else. Exactly what I wanted considering local doesn't work.
I'm from Germany and adrenaline is used as an addition as a vasoconstrictor here. There are quite a few differences between countries when it comes to anesthesia.
Also, even with the same person Novocaine can react differently sometimes (I've had enough cavities to know). And if you have an infection, that counteracts the Novocaine so they have to give you more (had that one happen to me too). Medicine is complicated, yo.
I've only been put under once and it was when I was very, very young (3 for hernia surgery, I'm in my mid-40s now) and I had a similar experience, except I came to ~half way through and picked up my head, wondering what the fuck was happening to me, before promptly being put under again. It's my earliest memory but it's also one of the only strong memories I have before 6-7 years old.
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
That's basically sleep for me. I know I must dream but I only very rarely even remember the smallest fragment of any dreams. So sleeping is like I've not existed for 7 hours from my conscious perspective.
Same with me, check yourself for sleep apnea and "sugar crash" during sleep if you can...
Interestingly some medications like tadalafil restore my dreams... My smart watch also tells me the phases like remand deep have normal lengths. So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
> So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
You might be having those but “not having dreams” is not an indication of that. And i put the “not having dreams” in quotes because for most people they have dreams but then go on to forget them.
If you are having other symptomps by all means get it checked out. But if your only symptom is not remembering dreams i wouldn’t worry about that.
It's such a waste. You're there with all your personality and you're gone the next. It is quite bad. That's why I think religions came up with an idea of hell...
One may think, any existence is better than nothing.
I got put under as a teen for an appendectomy. Shocking. I was absolutely 100% certain I'd stay awake while counting until I hit at least 2-3. I think I made it to 8, then yeah - just like a scene change in a show. I was simply suddenly somewhere else - the recovery room. Apparently I tried to fight the nurses because I wanted to lay on my side (that had JUST been cut open)? I literally have no memory and apologized profusely. I don't even know how that happened - I'm not a violent man. I've been in one (very minor) fight (middle school), and I'm super easy-going in general. It takes a LOT to get under my skin.
Yes, I experienced the same, it was like what they call in cinema a "jump cut". I remember the doors to the OR opening, then bang i was in a bed in the recovery room. Like the universe glitched.
Pretty much the same experience when I had surgery. Just a complete jump over the time I was out. I remember the mask going on, counting backwards, and then I was waking up. No sense whatsoever that any time had passed.
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
"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."
Long time ago, while running cat5 in a large open ceiling, I stepped off of a large metal beam onto what I thought was the concrete ceiling of an outdoor awning, but was in fact droptile. Fell right through, of course, and landed more-or-less on my back. The floor was that hard institutional carpet.
I don't remember anything about the fall itself. After hitting the floor I immediately got to my feet, realized the breath had been knocked out of me, tried to call my partner's name, then sat back down. I think the pain came shortly after that.
It’s not surprising that in life threatening situations the brain would focus all of its attention on the immediate situation, rather than worrying about the usual crap the brain worries about (like paying your bills).
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 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.
Same here, I flew head first down a ramp because I slammed the breakes too hard and the next thing I remember is people asking if anybody had a handkerchief or something, since my head was bleeding. A solid five minute blackout.
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.
all of my incidents of losing consciousness were absolute voids to me. Once I apparently hit the back of a car on my bike and I just kind of woke up with no idea what had happened (I say "apparently" because I don't really know... I was riding my bike and suddenly I was laying on the side of the road, no in between. The other time my father punched me in the face, knocking the back of my head into the corner of a metal oven hood. I remember that but then the next thing was coming to on the ground with him over me, hands around my neck squeezing. Nothing whatsoever in between the start and end of events.
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.
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.
Ha! I like the thought of unconciousness triggering a "kernel OOPS" and the brain dumping out a backtrace of everything. Makes you wonder who is supposed to debug it later ...
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.
“ If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark “
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 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.
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I'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.
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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:
> In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).
> The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.
Right, the 250 microgram figure was the maximum amount that you might dump into your system in one go, normal DMT blood concentration is far lower. The bare minimum for a psychedelic experience is 20k micrograms, but many people won't notice anything overt until 35k+, and a full "breakthrough" experience requires 50k or more, generally speaking, independent of weight.
For such a tiny amount of DMT to have a significant impact, it would have to be 40 to 100 times more "effective" than usual, or be supported by the soup of other chemicals released in those situations in a sort of entourage effect, with MAO metabolism reduced, and all sorts of neurons firing that otherwise would be silent.
NDEs often overlap real events, where full-on DMT trips shut out the world, so the entourage effect theory makes the most sense to me. Your brain gets overwhelmed, and the dump of DMT all at once, with serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline maxed out as well, contributes to a predictable psychedelic effect on subjective experience.
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.
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.
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.
I once read this thing somewhere, might have been reddit, but the person explained it like this and even if not completely true it makes a lot of sense. When the brain is dying, it searches through past experiences—something it’s never faced before—trying to find a way to survive. That process is what we perceive as life flashbacks.
Do non-dying human brains show waves similar to memory flashbacks? What about dead human brains? Just thinking about that study on fMRI and dead trout.
Not exactly the topic - but I went through a strange consciousness bottleneck during a near death experience (in risk terms, not in the medical death sense), in which I was extremely lucky.
A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.
I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.
As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.
The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.
Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.
I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.
Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.
Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.
Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.
Wow, thank you for sharing this. Kudos on surviving this.
I had an interesting experience during a high speed car crash years ago.
I was driving on a newly built motorway going south from Gdansk(in Poland) around 2am, in the rain in a very old rented VW Golf.
Before, when I got to the (cheap)rental place the seatbelt on the driver's side was caught behind the interior plastic panel. The guy that owned the place looked at me (wearing a suit, I just gotten off a plane) and said "You don't mind driving without a seatbelt don't you? This is the only car I can give you." To which I replied "no way", and "do you have a screwdriver"?
Then I proceeded to take off that interior panel. I freed the seatbelt and got on my way. This has saved me from very serious injury.
So, coming back to that moment. I'm driving at around 140kmh (which is normal speed at these roads, only 30kmh over limit). It is raining. I'm coming over a gentle curve and I see red lights of a big truck in my lane, so I flip the indicator with intention to overtake it (still maybe 300m away). As I'm changing lanes closing on it around that gentle long curve I suddenly see there is another set of lights in the left lane in front of the truck. That driver must have got startled by my lights because the moment I saw him his brake lights lit up (and I'm accelerating maybe 150m behind, gaining on him fast). I have to brake hard. I know my Golf at home with my tires would make it. This one didn't.
I lost maybe a third of the speed when it started fishtailing strong. By the time the other cars moved far enough so I could let go the brakes a bit, but instead of straightening it, the car spun sideways and slammed into the barrier.
I remember braking, turning, counter steering like in slow motion, then the last moment once car spun and was just about to hit I thought "That is going to hurt". Last thing I remember was a feeling of surprise how "soft" the crash felt.
I expected to feel a hard slam, it felt like I jumped into a soft bed and suddenly darkness and I feel wet on my hair. An instantaneous transition like in a movie. My first thought is "blood, I'm seriously injured", but no, this was rain. Suddenly I see some light and I remember I sit in a dark smashed up car in a middle of a motorway (it bounced off the barrier) over a hill and another car is quickly approaching without seeing me....
So I jump out of this car and (I didn't feel any injury with so much adrenalin) I push the screeching lump of metal on the driver side pillar as hard as I can, trying to get it off at least the left lane.
Thankfully the other driver saw me from far away, could slow down and stop in time. He helped me push the car onto the shoulder.
When police and ambulance came. The Police guy looked at the car, looked at me and said "where is the driver?" I said "I am" and he says "are you sure? If you're pretending for someone drunk that escaped it is a criminal offense"... Other than few scratches I was completely uninjured. The car looked horrible.
The police guy also said "we're having accidents on this stretch of the road every time it rains, they are going to replace the surface so I'm not going to fine you"... Well, good to know. They did rip it out few months later.
I estimate I couldn't be going that fast during that crash, as I was fine, or maybe I was lucky, but the car was totalled. I remember I paid £750 to the rental guy. That is how much the car was worth in it's entirety...
I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.
> I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.
That was a great move!
I guess in a thread on an article which mixes a little bit of mysticism into medicine, a little science philosophy fits. I take the plain reading of quantum field equations at face value. I.e. that superposition is real in the normal sense, and that quantum "collapse" is a perceived effect, not actually the superposition reducing to one history, but just the effect of a history becoming entangled with enough particles to be robustly statistically separated from other histories.
(I have never understood why even some scientists can't take the equations at face value, when they already explain why large things don't act like individual particles, despite following the same rules. Without any "observer" voodoo. It as if those scientists agreed the equations say the Earth orbits the sun, and that calculating that way is the right way. But still propose there is some as yet gap in our understanding, that we need to resolve to make that consistent with our perception that the Sun goes around us - despite no actual gap that needs explaining.)
So given that interpretation, we are likely to always (to a high statistical degree) survive scary situations. We may not make it through a high percentage of histories, a high percentage of others' histories may experience us dying, but we of course, are only aware of the histories in which we make it. This also creates an explanation for why we, as a particularly constructed human, exist. We are simply aware of the history in which we are. Not any of the overwhelming number of histories of our universe in which we are not.
Among all the histories of the universe, given that they include every possible (consistent) history, and given that we are just normal chemistry despite our complex construction of statistically unlikely survivals, some have to include us.
That explains (1) our lucky survivals (of ourselves, others certainly experience us dying), (2) our initial personal existence, and (3) the existence of life on Earth. And if there are superpositioned variants of universe laws in a similar fashion (we don't know that yet, but it is a credible idea), (4) why there are histories of universes with laws consistent with us. If it's possible in terms of physical or the ultimate laws, and all consistent possibilities exist, then it is a certainty that there is a version of reality which includes us. And that is of course, where we find ourselves.
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've been listening to a book: Opening Heaven's Door.
The authors sister was dying of cancer. One morning her sister said she had a strange dream about her father. They later realized that their father had unexpectedly died around the time of the dream. Her sister then went on to have some interesting experiences around her own death from cancer.
The author began talking to people, as part of her grieving, and realized many families have experiences like this, but nobody talks about it.
Eventually she realized why few talk about it:
She was at a social gathering of some kind and was talking about her recent enthusiasm for this sort of spiritual near-death stuff, and she shared her experience with a man, who she mentioned was a tech worker (judge for yourself whether that deserves special mention). The tech worker listened to her experience and then felt it was his place to tell the author that it was all coincidence or hallucinations created by a dying brain. She then points out that the guy had no special training that makes his opinion any more respectable than hers. The tech guy knew how to use computers, he wasn't a neuroscientists or a doctor or a psychologist, he just felt he knew, probably because he picked up some ideas from Reddit comments or something, and he had to share his opinion.
Anyway, I hold out some hope that there might still be some mysteries in this world.
A lot of people, especially the tech crowd, have been taught in undergrad the importance of critical thinking and evidence supported conclusions. Also, I think the science/mathematical mind is drawn to this line of thinking as well, which is understandable. I know extremely well how they feel, as I've always operated the same way.
That is why faith in some kind of God or afterlife goes against everything we in the tech crowd are trained to do. The hardest thing about being a Christian or believing in an afterlife IMO is the faith aspect itself.
The guy was obviously non-empathic and impolite, and probably clueless that he was causing distress. The only thing in his favor is that he was correct.
I’ve had a wild life. I was a Protestant for over thirty years and I became a Catholic around two years ago. I’ve had more than a few demons attack me and two confirmed good spirits, probably angels. The test for spirits is to get them to agree that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. It’s sometimes difficult to understand them, but anyway I really believe the Bible and supernatural stuff. If anyone on here wants to reach out my email is in my profile.
What pushed you to Catholicism? I see the Catholic church as an amalgamation of human innovations that attempt to turn focus away from Christ and towards the inevitably sinful authority of the church. As much as I can't stand the watered-down one-size-fits-all non-denominational sermons of my youth, or the few fire and brimstone sessions I've been witness to, at the very least their prayers go directly to God.
I upvoted you even though we presently disagree because you bring an honest perspective to the discussion.
The main reason I was drawn to the Catholic Church was that I believed in transubstantiation, or at least the real presence. I was drawn to the history of the Church and through prayer and conversations as well as a supernatural event as well as a dream I prayed for, I finally came to accept that praying with saints was not worshiping them. All prayers with saints go directly to God, but sometimes having someone intercede for you, as Mary did at the wedding feast at Cana, helps you with God.
If you have an open mind to switching churches, I recommend the following:
1. Pray to God to guide you to the right Church. I believe that he may be guiding some people to the Catholic Church, others to the Orthodox Church, and some to Protestant churches. Or He may have a real preference. I'm not sure, but I tried pretty hard to figure out where to go and I ended up in the Catholic Church.
2. Take the core issues that are show stoppers for you and research (and pray) them from the other perspective. Like I did with prayer with saints.
3. If you are feeling to be led to a certain church, get the full catechism of that church and read through it. I was shocked at how little I disagreed with the Catholic Church's catechism. It gave me confidence that I was truly being led to Catholicism.
4. Talk to Christians that you look up to. This is what I did with prayer with saints. There was a Christian uncle of mine (not blood, married in) that I was just completely sure that he was a real Christian and he was a Catholic. He explained it to me in ways that made sense and he answered any of my questions. I ended up adopting his middle name Jacques. Which leads to the funny sounding name Zach Jacques Aysan.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and I shall pray for you in turn. I'm used to people turning towards the Catholic church as they become more legalistic and hard of heart, so your answer caught me by surprise. I also believe in a God that may have a different answer for each one of us, and so I feel that the answer for me at this time might be something like a small men's Bible study group. Christ be with you always.
Sure. It's not just atheists here. There's a fair number of Christians (Catholic, Protestant, some Orthodox). There's some Muslims and Jews. Hindus, if you count reincarnation as an afterlife. Probably some that I have missed.
The way i like to think of this is along the lines of mathematics as usual. Because everything we observe in this universe so far adheres to mathematics except the inside of a blackhole, what happens after death also remains one of the many infinite possibilities. one possibility is that nothing happens and you are just gone gone. Another possibility is that you get reincarnated based on your karma. Another possibility is that you go to heaven or hell. Another possibility is that something entirely different happens as soon as you step outside this spacetime continuum because death takes you outside this thing for sure. There could be another infinite list of possibilities that none of the religions and none of the humans have accounted for
You can find some on the right wing catholic rationalist community on substack, I say without a hint of irony. The topic of the day is whether cloud droplets preferentially scatter forward, as pertains to the miracle at fatima
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..
An interesting question that arises naturally but is entirely unaddressed in the article is “why (and how) would evolution select for this kind of final behaviour?” Given that by definition the process of death occurs well after the phase of out-reproducing others, how would evolution even have an opportunity to select for this “closing of the curtains” moment. It would have to be the byproduct of something that enhances reproductive fitness during the fertile period or extends that period of fertility. Maybe those who have less traumatic near-death-experiences go on to have children (or more children) than those who faced a nihilistic experience? That really seems to be utterly marginal and likely to be swamped by genetic drift. Also remember that arguably it’s the genes that are using us to procreate, not the other way around (selfish gene hypothesis). I really don’t understand how this could arise, and insofar as I don’t understand how it could arise, I’m fairly skeptical that it’s actually occurring (slightly skewed take on scientific empiricism I know, but I’m a Bayesian at heart).
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
Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.
> “Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling – and then it's just one case. So we can't make very big assumptions and claims based on this case. ..."
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.
I'm not saying you should forget it, but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.
Trying now to analyze the limit of this principle as the bully approaches POTUS.
I don't think this principle holds to this extreme.
In the case where you are still actively being bullied, you gotta do something to stop it first
On the other hand, every effort each of us makes to eliminate bullying from this world is another effort toward making this world a better place.
The trick is to have those thoughts, plans, and actions actually lead to results rather than just anxieties about the past.
How do you think that would work? People will just accuse you of interfering with their raising their children and that you shouldn't raise yours to be a snowflake -- not saying this is true but I can already hear their reasoning.
Maybe we should build laws to make parents more accountable, but then it's the other discussion where we are make the state police us even more and putting more power to the state.
I really don't see a way out other than to focus on other things and take care of ourselves.
Start with the simple. Don't be a bystander. "Next time I see somebody berating a retail worker, I will defend them"
Although it usually needs to start more introspectively: "Next time I am about to lose my temper, I will take a deep breath and consider if yelling is the best course of action or rather something less aggressive."
With children, there's something to be said about them learning to stand up for themselves; tattletales aren't something to admire. But at some point it is actually the correct course of action to interfere with children-raising, especially when it affects my children.
Dude, where I live a garbage truck worker got shot in the back the other say by a rich dude just because they got into an argument. You can't interfere and expect first that people will owe you a good response just because you intervened, and second that you will go through this unscathed.
We need to protect each other, but we need to know how to care. Sometimes what you see unraveling in front of you is the culmination of deep factors that you can't fight with enough attitude or willpower.
I know where you are coming from and I hope if I see something happen like this in front of me I'll have the courage and peace of mind to rightfully intervene, but that's not always the case and we can't hold bystanders in contempt because they chose to stay away. People are just nuts.
> but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.
I agree with this and this is why I'm an advocate of fighting back on the spot, yelling, etc, if it's someone crossing a boundary such that it'll bother you forever. Because if you hold you ground, it's over and you held your ground, nothing to be upset about again.
Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. I tried that and gotten beaten up and punished by the school for starting a fight. Multiple times. The bullies never got punished. This happened at two different schools.
I had difficulty explaining what happened due to being neurodivergent, so I was always punished. And my parents weren’t able to help me.
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?
"further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance" doesn't sound anything at all like "turning around" to me.
What is stopping you from beating up bullies every time they bully others as well?
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Could you _be_ more condescending?
Yeah. It’s a pretty low blow to hit the sociologists with the Harvard jab.
Alternatively: to the person they're responding to who just shared their knowledge. Yeesh
>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.
This is a really good post that people should reflect on.
There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.
> There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.
The right to defend one's self is a critical requirement for freedom, and all that goes with it.
Imagine telling kids that not only should they not defend themselves, but that they should also pay for the bullies groceries and electricity.
If you were assaulted, why not sue the person who assaulted you?
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
Not until he becomes a cop or local politician that is.
Somehow others experience shit situations without needing to self-sooth by inflicting similar pain on others.
Bullying is not a form of innocently misguided, or sympathy deserving, coping.
I think that view is best interpreted as an inaccurate but well meaning rationalization offered to bullied people, to suggest more passive karma is present than there is. Often by those uncomfortable with the pervasive element of real-politik physical negotiation throughout nature.
Bullies are cruel because they are getting something psychological and practical from the practice. Usually both. Violence exists because it is a very effective tool.
And just as easily a tool for good. Bullies’ behavior is famously responsive to people who vigorously retaliate or are strongly defended. Even to the point of genuinely respecting those strong enough to give back punishment, as well as they can take.
Bullies are also famously quick to offer their subservience to bigger bullies. Suddenly pliable “lambs” in that context, offering up their own power. These are rational choices for those that operate in the violence economy, not the flailings of broken souls.
Which makes standing up to all bullies in the world dramatically more important, than the calculus of any individual situation might seem to suggest.
Like all economic realms, norms that bend to lower the costs of applying bullying, violence, threat and fear power, only incentivize further expansion, investment and innovation.
Sometimes. I had a kid who’d get his buddies together and ambush me in the way out of school. His mom was an employee and the school staff would mysteriously not see anything involving him.
He then came at me by himself with a stick when I was walking my sister home far from school. I beat the shit out of him, broke his nose, bruised a rib and he sprained his ankle. My sister told her friends, and all of those little shits stayed away. He’s lucky - a year or two later I would have been stronger and probably hurt him pretty bad.
I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now. I’m sure the kid had problems, but it wasn’t my responsibility as a 10/11 year old to hug it out, and none of the 1980s adults seemed to give a shit.
> I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now.
As a father of five, with the youngest now in high school, my recent experience is we've moved from physical violence to using the system to bully victims.
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
Beating up a bully as self defence is categorically different from beating up a random bully. Neither is also necessary for the next step, which is involving authorities to establish a path to rehabiliation or incapacitation.
> 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.
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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.
As a kid, yes. As an adult protecting your kid, also yes. As a way to discourage bullies from bullying? Unless you are willing to escalate to jail, no. And even then it isn't that you have dissuaded them, it is that you are physically restraining them.
We can pretty reliably do better than that now. And yes, schoolyard bullying is way down from what it used to be. (A fact somewhat hidden by our calling out milder forms of bullying.)
I'm glad your dad told you to fight back. It's good for a child's development to stick up for themselves, using violence as a last resort if needed.
Sure, if you fight back, the bully is less likely to pick on you. They’ll just pick on the next weakest kid instead.
So what, I'm supposed to let myself get beat up so the bully doesn't pick somebody else instead?
Your theory is bullshit anyway, the more times the bully encounters resistance, the more opportunities that bully has to learn to be better.
I don't think you've thought this through.
You should volunteer yourself as a victim to save others! You sound like you're very noble.
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.
No, they are related. Corporal punishment of children predicts later bullying. Here are two random links into the research.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37267760/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/...
My comment has nothing to do with corporal punishment causing bullying.
I'm referring to children being left to deal with bullying directly, however it arrives inside the bully.
Whether bullying arises from home, adults at school, or otherwise is secondary.
Teachers today can often tell kids to sort it out themselves.
The strategy is to remain respectful, firmly ask for it to stop, tell an adult, and if all of those things have failed, self-defence is a last resort to the point of stopping the current and future level of bullying.
There is a reason parents put their kids into martial arts, etc.
punishing by adults in charge. fighting back and a promise to always pay back more is very different.
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.
from figures in authority, yes. but in practise, bullies respond very well to a bigger bully. it's the entire basis of government - the monopoly on violence.
> This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research
Anecdotally, it worked for me :shrug:
So what is your suggested solution? Myself and several other commenters know an effective solution that you’ve poop-pooed, so offer something better.
>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 can tell you first hand this definitely isn't true in all cases.
We had a bully at my school who constantly picked on all sorts of people. Eventually he decided to pick on one of my best friends who got sick of it and took him to the ground and punched him in the face about 15 times.
It was like a light switch - the bully became one of the chillest, nicest kids in our grade after that. He figured out pretty quickly that getting punched in the face isn't much fun and decided it was probably better to stop being a dick to everyone around him because he didn't know who the next person was that would return his shenanigans with violence.
> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act (...) 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
human social life is complex and such overgeneralization are almost never right
in some cases self-defense entirely fixes the problem
> We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.
that is an utter nonsense, in some cases endless hugging and patting just leaves you exploited
> passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them
well, sadly sometimes violence is right or least bad solution
I've only been bullied once, so it's hard for me to really talk outside of that single time. I'm different and I've never given too many fucks about social norms or hierarchies, and I guess a bully from two grades above me took that as a sign I would be a good victim. Anyway, I knew what way he walked home, so the day after he had bullied me I hid in a bush. When he walked by I ambushed him with a stick and demanded he give me his school bagpack... I hoisted it into the school flagpole the next day... Like a total psychopath. Looking back on it, it's frigthening how few consequences there was for what was obviously way out of line. I guess the early 90ies were just a different time.
He probably had a shit life, but I never saw him bully anyone again.
Stunningly weak mentality. Not surprised to see it on display here, HN is polluted with broken dorks.
If you don't fight back you will be the victim of further abuse. If there's no countervailing force against sadistic psychopaths, they will continue their destructive behavior.
You should absolutely beat the shit out of bullies. To idly stand by out of some misguided slave morality, you permit their evil, and allow the world to become worse.
> 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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I do have dreams of beating up bullies. Count me in.
Finally growing up big enough and successfully beating up a bully was one of the best memories of childhood I have...
There were times over the years I played the waiting game and got back at certain bullies. Each time I got in a heap of trouble, but always recovered my pound of flesh.
What I find aggravating is when people turn to the "grow up, what's past is past" after they faced no consequences for their actions. Now you're the bad guy for not letting it go.
Each time I was forced to fight a bully, I came away from it horrified by what I'd done. Violence never felt good to me.
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.
that is not a valid reason for others to suffer their cruelty and not apply effective self-defense
Clarification: I never justified what bullies do, just giving an explanation. I should have made more explicit that punishing alone accomplishes nothing if the source of the problem isn't addressed: they just go to the next easier victim.
Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.
This is my nightmare. That me dying will feel just like my regular nightmares that I have today, which are all about common day stressful situations like not finding my partner in a crowd, or constantly chasing the same person and never catching up to them.
An anxiety filled death is what I have coming.
Perhaps a peaceful and serene death doesn't exist despite what people would like to believe so you won't be missing out.
I feel for you INTPenis
My brother picked me up by the neck once. I still have nightmares about it. Kids are so insanely cruel.
Caught this podcast recently on near death experiences (NDE), which discusses some of the recent research as well as spiritual factors:
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/godforbid/near-death-...
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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.
I had a procedure recently and the description in the preparation instructions said "you won't be asleep, but you might not remember everything"
I talked to the nurse about this as I was prepping for the procedure, and he said that a recent patient talked throughout the procedure, but when he got back to his room afterwards, he asked "so when will the procedure start?"
So, I think the drugs you get might let experience everything. But the "nothing in between" might actually be memory loss, not loss of consciousness.
all this stuff is spooky and philosophically tricky.
Benzodiazepines = memory loss Propofol = we turned your brain off
Nothing stops us from using both, where strategically appropriate.
That sounds more like fentanyl (which is widely used as anesthesia for minor surgeries). With fentanyl you'll be awake but loopy and not fully there. Propofol feels like time had an entire section removed with before and after spliced directly together.
In my personal experience for a day procedure (gastroscopy) it was fentanyl + midazolam, although on another occasion for the same procedure they added ketamine for some reason.
In the latter case I actually remember more of the procedure - although I was completely detached and thought it lasted about a minute (it was a 10-15 min procedure). In that case I can recall having the tube removed and passing out what seems like instantly.
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?
It's both. In smaller doses, anesthetics like propofol will leave you groggy but semi-awake and able to respond to commands. But you won't be able to form long term memories so you won't remember afterwards. This is "twilight sedation" and is what you usually get when you get a procedure like an endoscopy or colonscopy. You are somewhat awake so that you can help reposition yourself and stuff if they need you to.
In larger doses, propofol will completely eliminate consciousness. This is "general anesthesia" and what you get when you go in for a major surgical procedure. You are completely unresponsive to any stimuli.
There are levels in between these too. Consciousness is a spectrum.
As far as I know, propofol doesn't make you feel particularly good or block pain. It just kind of makes you go away. So in addition, at all levels of anesthesia, they also typically give you a narcotic like fentanyl so that you aren't suffering. They aren't just letting you scream in pain and then erasing the tape afterwards.
As someone who has had a couple of procedures where they pushed the fentanyl into the IV before the propofol, I can 100% assure that pain was the absolute last thing I was feeling. Hell, I was still high as a kite after the propofol wore off when I got home. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of metal recently unscrewed from my leg bones thinking about literally nothing in the world beyond, "holy fuck this eggnog is the best beverage I've ever had in my life I wish I could drink it forever".
My recent colonoscopy used fentanyl. I wasn't loopy afterwards but we did (as directed) arrange to have someone else drive me home.
All in all, I really appreciate the loss of memory formation, since the most annoying part of these procedures for me is the boredom. Just splice all that out, thanks.
>This is "twilight sedation" and is what you usually get when you get a procedure like an endoscopy
The only thing I got for my endoscopy a couple of years ago was some numbing spray for my nose and a decongestant.
Wow, really? That sounds horrific. How did you not gag constantly?
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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!
I would much rather not!
> 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)
To be fair, the use of midazolam is ultimately up to your healthcare professionals. It's not required and may be skipped if they think it would be harmful (age or respiratory / nervous system health) or is unnecessary (no anxiety). It's almost always given as an IV drip 10-ish minutes before wheeling you around to the OR, which is how you'd recognize if you got it. It's just a very common practice to give it by default for most people under 65-ish.
You may also require either a higher baseline dose than expected, and an onset of acute anxiety can actually affect dosing too. Both totally normal!
Either way, it's best to speak with your doctor leading up to surgery if that experience was upsetting. There's lots that can be done for dosage, supplemental medication, etc. Your comfort is important!
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.
In some cases. My first experience with my wife in an ER (there have been many!), the doc came up to us and said exactly this. They needed to reposition a broken bone so it could be put in a cast before surgery to rebuild the wrist could be scheduled. Since it would only take a few seconds, instead of anesthesia they would use a medication that would let her be aware of the process, but she would forget it almost immediately after.
That was about 20 years ago. To this day, the last thing she remembers is lying on the table and saying "OK, let's git-er-done" and the next 5-10 minutes are missing.
>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.
That's called twilight anesthesia and it's used for some procedures, not others. Usually used for stuff like wisdom teeth extraction and colonoscopies. Anything "major" and you're getting general anesthesia. You can ask what type of anesthesia you will be receiving (twilight or general).
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_anesthesia
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.
That's more than fair I'd say.
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.
I also heard that. It was said by a physician (IIRC, from a Boston hospital), who was sitting in on Marvin Minsky's class at MIT, circa 2000.
> 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.
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.
Ah thank you! That's super interesting. What an interesting job Anaesthetists have. I'm very greatful to mine, I always feel looked after when in his hands.
Humans react differently or have different tolerances, for example my teeth are very sensitive to pain and I needed extra adrenaline to fully numb it, even though I don't take drugs or have anything indicating that this would be necessary.
> extra adrenaline to fully numb it,
That's not what they usually use... but people have different reactions to novacaine, and different innervation; for dental work, there's a couple typical options for where nerves are and which nerves cover which teeth, some of which need more shots in more places.
For the GP, most likely the anesthetist put a note in the chart that they need more or different drugs to go under.
Can confirm.
My lips and gums go numb but my teeth generally do not. I am sure it takes the edge off, but I can still feel it and it is still incredibly uncomfortable.
On the other hand, while having a tooth pulled and opting to be put under, the nurse and I were having a great laugh after because I was so awake. Apparently there are multiple drugs and whatever the first one was hit me so hard they only have me a half dose of another. It was enough though. They said count, I hit nine, and I woke up somewhere else. Exactly what I wanted considering local doesn't work.
I'm from Germany and adrenaline is used as an addition as a vasoconstrictor here. There are quite a few differences between countries when it comes to anesthesia.
Also, even with the same person Novocaine can react differently sometimes (I've had enough cavities to know). And if you have an infection, that counteracts the Novocaine so they have to give you more (had that one happen to me too). Medicine is complicated, yo.
I've only been put under once and it was when I was very, very young (3 for hernia surgery, I'm in my mid-40s now) and I had a similar experience, except I came to ~half way through and picked up my head, wondering what the fuck was happening to me, before promptly being put under again. It's my earliest memory but it's also one of the only strong memories I have before 6-7 years old.
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.
That's basically sleep for me. I know I must dream but I only very rarely even remember the smallest fragment of any dreams. So sleeping is like I've not existed for 7 hours from my conscious perspective.
Same with me, check yourself for sleep apnea and "sugar crash" during sleep if you can...
Interestingly some medications like tadalafil restore my dreams... My smart watch also tells me the phases like remand deep have normal lengths. So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
> So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
You might be having those but “not having dreams” is not an indication of that. And i put the “not having dreams” in quotes because for most people they have dreams but then go on to forget them.
If you are having other symptomps by all means get it checked out. But if your only symptom is not remembering dreams i wouldn’t worry about that.
Do you smoke weed? It's well known that THC use causes dreamless sleep.
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?
It's such a waste. You're there with all your personality and you're gone the next. It is quite bad. That's why I think religions came up with an idea of hell...
One may think, any existence is better than nothing.
But think of the legacy of all the shareholder value you created...
Dying is generally pretty easy. It’s hardest on those left behind.
Missing out.
I got put under as a teen for an appendectomy. Shocking. I was absolutely 100% certain I'd stay awake while counting until I hit at least 2-3. I think I made it to 8, then yeah - just like a scene change in a show. I was simply suddenly somewhere else - the recovery room. Apparently I tried to fight the nurses because I wanted to lay on my side (that had JUST been cut open)? I literally have no memory and apologized profusely. I don't even know how that happened - I'm not a violent man. I've been in one (very minor) fight (middle school), and I'm super easy-going in general. It takes a LOT to get under my skin.
> It takes a LOT to get under my skin.
Ouch. Excessively appropriate choice of words there.
They really got under your skin.
Yes, I experienced the same, it was like what they call in cinema a "jump cut". I remember the doors to the OR opening, then bang i was in a bed in the recovery room. Like the universe glitched.
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.
> I thought I would gently fall asleep , but it was actually extremely fast.
Sometimes people fall asleep that way too, especially when very tired. The expression ‘out like a light’ seems apt.
There was nothing that you remember. That means there probably was nothing, but it's still a distinction that should be noted.
Last time I had a medical intervention with propofol I returned so relaxed that I thought I had died and was in the afterlife.
They usually ask me to "count backwards from 10". I don't think I get down to 0. It's _very_ fast.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Something like that happened to me in first grade. I was trying to go down a slide and a friend decided to climb the slide itself. He ended up launching me off the side of the slide. It was maybe a five or six foot slide, and I remember going over the side in slow motion, grabbing for the rim of the slide but being at least 6" away from reaching it, and then suddenly.. sharp pain and pitch black as I landed on my back.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
"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."
Long time ago, while running cat5 in a large open ceiling, I stepped off of a large metal beam onto what I thought was the concrete ceiling of an outdoor awning, but was in fact droptile. Fell right through, of course, and landed more-or-less on my back. The floor was that hard institutional carpet.
I don't remember anything about the fall itself. After hitting the floor I immediately got to my feet, realized the breath had been knocked out of me, tried to call my partner's name, then sat back down. I think the pain came shortly after that.
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.
It’s not surprising that in life threatening situations the brain would focus all of its attention on the immediate situation, rather than worrying about the usual crap the brain worries about (like paying your bills).
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
"Near death experience" or "out-of-body experience" are two search terms that surface more accounts like this.
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 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.
Same here, I flew head first down a ramp because I slammed the breakes too hard and the next thing I remember is people asking if anybody had a handkerchief or something, since my head was bleeding. A solid five minute blackout.
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.
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.
all of my incidents of losing consciousness were absolute voids to me. Once I apparently hit the back of a car on my bike and I just kind of woke up with no idea what had happened (I say "apparently" because I don't really know... I was riding my bike and suddenly I was laying on the side of the road, no in between. The other time my father punched me in the face, knocking the back of my head into the corner of a metal oven hood. I remember that but then the next thing was coming to on the ground with him over me, hands around my neck squeezing. Nothing whatsoever in between the start and end of events.
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.
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.
Ha! I like the thought of unconciousness triggering a "kernel OOPS" and the brain dumping out a backtrace of everything. Makes you wonder who is supposed to debug it later ...
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.
It's an amazing sensation. Not a pleasant one.
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.
“ If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark “
Relevant: https://youtu.be/ibpdNqrtar0
Thanks for sharing the link. It was as scientific as philosophical.
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 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.
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.
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
Put in your reading list The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allen Poe
“I say to you that I am dead!”
- https://www.online-literature.com/poe/30/
I am not so sure about this. What would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment, with all the risks of being treated in not-so-nice ways? Almost nobody wants to die in a hospital in the first place. And as part of a medical "experiment", no thanks. Science can fuck off as long as they don't have control over their (small, but existing) emotionally detached workers.
https://youtu.be/ET71mabgEuM
It doesn't matter that you aren't sure, and it doesn't even matter if most people agreed with you. Around 60 to 70 million people die every year globally, so if even a tiny fraction of these were willing to take part there would be sufficient numbers for a statistically significant study.
In any case, the fact that a significant number of people opt for organ or body donation suggests they are willing to allow their deaths to be useful to others in some way.
Organ donations pretty much happen after the fact, so that isn't really worth a comparison. There is a reason why Monty Python did their "can we have your liver then" sketch...
It's still a worthwhile comparison because it demonstrates that some people have a desire to turn their death into something meaningful or useful to others. After, all question was "what would motivate someone to willingly transform their last moments into a medical experiment?", and my examples are about motivation.
For some that motivation might be strong enough to be willing to undergo some discomfort (if, indeed there needs to be any discomfort in the first place, which isn't clear). For others, it might not be.
If you say so--for the sake of winning an arguemnt--there you go. You can have your victory, I don't care. The difference is still very fundamental, in a literal sense. Most people opposed to organ donations have religious reasons. I am an (not opted-out) organ donor, and I don't care about that. However, I would violently oppose being subjected to more machines then absolutely necessary while dying.
It's not about my victory or yours. It's merely the recognition that people can have all sorts of reasons for doing all sorts of things, and one person can think nothing of doing a thing which the person next to them would never dream of doing.
The fact that you personally would be happy to be an organ donor but would draw the line at having an ECG while dying is a perfectly valid position to take. Many people would no doubt take the same position. It's unlikely though that 60-70 million people per year would all react that way. Neither of us has to be right or wrong here (about the difference between the two scenarios), because it's other people's motivations we're talking about.
I'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.
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 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.
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.
I don’t think most people have the perspective that you do.
> 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 :)
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 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.
Saulus fell off his horse when "god spoke to him". Afterwards he converted and became Paulus.
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
Ramachandran, the Temporal Lobes and God - Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z4B5BYbjf8
This is great! Very much reflective of my experience
what was it like for you
From a personal experience perspective It’s a trip and like nothing else you’ve experienced.
The only thing I can metaphorically compare it to is what it looked like when Neo got pulled out of the matrix in the movie.
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.
> 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.
Spiritual perhaps in that it satisfies a need that cannot be provided by material comforts or by the mere intellectualising of it?
It's just a byproduct of needing to be syndicated at a University in Kentucky
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 1
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.
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.
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.
There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:
> In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).
> The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088236/
Presumably only 20% of the rats were religious.
Right, the 250 microgram figure was the maximum amount that you might dump into your system in one go, normal DMT blood concentration is far lower. The bare minimum for a psychedelic experience is 20k micrograms, but many people won't notice anything overt until 35k+, and a full "breakthrough" experience requires 50k or more, generally speaking, independent of weight.
For such a tiny amount of DMT to have a significant impact, it would have to be 40 to 100 times more "effective" than usual, or be supported by the soup of other chemicals released in those situations in a sort of entourage effect, with MAO metabolism reduced, and all sorts of neurons firing that otherwise would be silent.
NDEs often overlap real events, where full-on DMT trips shut out the world, so the entourage effect theory makes the most sense to me. Your brain gets overwhelmed, and the dump of DMT all at once, with serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline maxed out as well, contributes to a predictable psychedelic effect on subjective experience.
Interesting, thanks for the insight.
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.
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.
“””What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries.”””
Centuries?
Arguably there werent neuroscientists 1000 years ago
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.
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.
Was it this Geoffrey Hinton paper? It was in Scientific American in 1993.
Simulating Brain Damage:
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/sciam93.pdf
I don't think so. When I just asked an LLM though, the Hinton paper also came up. So it does look like a strong candidate.
If I am able to find it, I'll comment here.
It looks like the article cited is from 2022: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/arti...
I once read this thing somewhere, might have been reddit, but the person explained it like this and even if not completely true it makes a lot of sense. When the brain is dying, it searches through past experiences—something it’s never faced before—trying to find a way to survive. That process is what we perceive as life flashbacks.
Do non-dying human brains show waves similar to memory flashbacks? What about dead human brains? Just thinking about that study on fMRI and dead trout.
Not exactly the topic - but I went through a strange consciousness bottleneck during a near death experience (in risk terms, not in the medical death sense), in which I was extremely lucky.
A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.
I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.
As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.
The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.
Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.
I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.
Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.
Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.
Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.
Wow, thank you for sharing this. Kudos on surviving this.
I had an interesting experience during a high speed car crash years ago.
I was driving on a newly built motorway going south from Gdansk(in Poland) around 2am, in the rain in a very old rented VW Golf.
Before, when I got to the (cheap)rental place the seatbelt on the driver's side was caught behind the interior plastic panel. The guy that owned the place looked at me (wearing a suit, I just gotten off a plane) and said "You don't mind driving without a seatbelt don't you? This is the only car I can give you." To which I replied "no way", and "do you have a screwdriver"?
Then I proceeded to take off that interior panel. I freed the seatbelt and got on my way. This has saved me from very serious injury.
So, coming back to that moment. I'm driving at around 140kmh (which is normal speed at these roads, only 30kmh over limit). It is raining. I'm coming over a gentle curve and I see red lights of a big truck in my lane, so I flip the indicator with intention to overtake it (still maybe 300m away). As I'm changing lanes closing on it around that gentle long curve I suddenly see there is another set of lights in the left lane in front of the truck. That driver must have got startled by my lights because the moment I saw him his brake lights lit up (and I'm accelerating maybe 150m behind, gaining on him fast). I have to brake hard. I know my Golf at home with my tires would make it. This one didn't.
I lost maybe a third of the speed when it started fishtailing strong. By the time the other cars moved far enough so I could let go the brakes a bit, but instead of straightening it, the car spun sideways and slammed into the barrier.
I remember braking, turning, counter steering like in slow motion, then the last moment once car spun and was just about to hit I thought "That is going to hurt". Last thing I remember was a feeling of surprise how "soft" the crash felt.
I expected to feel a hard slam, it felt like I jumped into a soft bed and suddenly darkness and I feel wet on my hair. An instantaneous transition like in a movie. My first thought is "blood, I'm seriously injured", but no, this was rain. Suddenly I see some light and I remember I sit in a dark smashed up car in a middle of a motorway (it bounced off the barrier) over a hill and another car is quickly approaching without seeing me....
So I jump out of this car and (I didn't feel any injury with so much adrenalin) I push the screeching lump of metal on the driver side pillar as hard as I can, trying to get it off at least the left lane.
Thankfully the other driver saw me from far away, could slow down and stop in time. He helped me push the car onto the shoulder.
When police and ambulance came. The Police guy looked at the car, looked at me and said "where is the driver?" I said "I am" and he says "are you sure? If you're pretending for someone drunk that escaped it is a criminal offense"... Other than few scratches I was completely uninjured. The car looked horrible.
The police guy also said "we're having accidents on this stretch of the road every time it rains, they are going to replace the surface so I'm not going to fine you"... Well, good to know. They did rip it out few months later.
I estimate I couldn't be going that fast during that crash, as I was fine, or maybe I was lucky, but the car was totalled. I remember I paid £750 to the rental guy. That is how much the car was worth in it's entirety...
I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.
> I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.
That was a great move!
I guess in a thread on an article which mixes a little bit of mysticism into medicine, a little science philosophy fits. I take the plain reading of quantum field equations at face value. I.e. that superposition is real in the normal sense, and that quantum "collapse" is a perceived effect, not actually the superposition reducing to one history, but just the effect of a history becoming entangled with enough particles to be robustly statistically separated from other histories.
(I have never understood why even some scientists can't take the equations at face value, when they already explain why large things don't act like individual particles, despite following the same rules. Without any "observer" voodoo. It as if those scientists agreed the equations say the Earth orbits the sun, and that calculating that way is the right way. But still propose there is some as yet gap in our understanding, that we need to resolve to make that consistent with our perception that the Sun goes around us - despite no actual gap that needs explaining.)
So given that interpretation, we are likely to always (to a high statistical degree) survive scary situations. We may not make it through a high percentage of histories, a high percentage of others' histories may experience us dying, but we of course, are only aware of the histories in which we make it. This also creates an explanation for why we, as a particularly constructed human, exist. We are simply aware of the history in which we are. Not any of the overwhelming number of histories of our universe in which we are not.
Among all the histories of the universe, given that they include every possible (consistent) history, and given that we are just normal chemistry despite our complex construction of statistically unlikely survivals, some have to include us.
That explains (1) our lucky survivals (of ourselves, others certainly experience us dying), (2) our initial personal existence, and (3) the existence of life on Earth. And if there are superpositioned variants of universe laws in a similar fashion (we don't know that yet, but it is a credible idea), (4) why there are histories of universes with laws consistent with us. If it's possible in terms of physical or the ultimate laws, and all consistent possibilities exist, then it is a certainty that there is a version of reality which includes us. And that is of course, where we find ourselves.
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.
Hard to select for adaptive traits for something that only happens just before you die.
Are there any software engineers here that believe in the afterlife?
I've been listening to a book: Opening Heaven's Door.
The authors sister was dying of cancer. One morning her sister said she had a strange dream about her father. They later realized that their father had unexpectedly died around the time of the dream. Her sister then went on to have some interesting experiences around her own death from cancer.
The author began talking to people, as part of her grieving, and realized many families have experiences like this, but nobody talks about it.
Eventually she realized why few talk about it:
She was at a social gathering of some kind and was talking about her recent enthusiasm for this sort of spiritual near-death stuff, and she shared her experience with a man, who she mentioned was a tech worker (judge for yourself whether that deserves special mention). The tech worker listened to her experience and then felt it was his place to tell the author that it was all coincidence or hallucinations created by a dying brain. She then points out that the guy had no special training that makes his opinion any more respectable than hers. The tech guy knew how to use computers, he wasn't a neuroscientists or a doctor or a psychologist, he just felt he knew, probably because he picked up some ideas from Reddit comments or something, and he had to share his opinion.
Anyway, I hold out some hope that there might still be some mysteries in this world.
A lot of people, especially the tech crowd, have been taught in undergrad the importance of critical thinking and evidence supported conclusions. Also, I think the science/mathematical mind is drawn to this line of thinking as well, which is understandable. I know extremely well how they feel, as I've always operated the same way.
That is why faith in some kind of God or afterlife goes against everything we in the tech crowd are trained to do. The hardest thing about being a Christian or believing in an afterlife IMO is the faith aspect itself.
The guy was obviously non-empathic and impolite, and probably clueless that he was causing distress. The only thing in his favor is that he was correct.
I’ve had a wild life. I was a Protestant for over thirty years and I became a Catholic around two years ago. I’ve had more than a few demons attack me and two confirmed good spirits, probably angels. The test for spirits is to get them to agree that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. It’s sometimes difficult to understand them, but anyway I really believe the Bible and supernatural stuff. If anyone on here wants to reach out my email is in my profile.
What pushed you to Catholicism? I see the Catholic church as an amalgamation of human innovations that attempt to turn focus away from Christ and towards the inevitably sinful authority of the church. As much as I can't stand the watered-down one-size-fits-all non-denominational sermons of my youth, or the few fire and brimstone sessions I've been witness to, at the very least their prayers go directly to God.
I upvoted you even though we presently disagree because you bring an honest perspective to the discussion.
The main reason I was drawn to the Catholic Church was that I believed in transubstantiation, or at least the real presence. I was drawn to the history of the Church and through prayer and conversations as well as a supernatural event as well as a dream I prayed for, I finally came to accept that praying with saints was not worshiping them. All prayers with saints go directly to God, but sometimes having someone intercede for you, as Mary did at the wedding feast at Cana, helps you with God.
If you have an open mind to switching churches, I recommend the following:
1. Pray to God to guide you to the right Church. I believe that he may be guiding some people to the Catholic Church, others to the Orthodox Church, and some to Protestant churches. Or He may have a real preference. I'm not sure, but I tried pretty hard to figure out where to go and I ended up in the Catholic Church.
2. Take the core issues that are show stoppers for you and research (and pray) them from the other perspective. Like I did with prayer with saints.
3. If you are feeling to be led to a certain church, get the full catechism of that church and read through it. I was shocked at how little I disagreed with the Catholic Church's catechism. It gave me confidence that I was truly being led to Catholicism.
4. Talk to Christians that you look up to. This is what I did with prayer with saints. There was a Christian uncle of mine (not blood, married in) that I was just completely sure that he was a real Christian and he was a Catholic. He explained it to me in ways that made sense and he answered any of my questions. I ended up adopting his middle name Jacques. Which leads to the funny sounding name Zach Jacques Aysan.
I've prayed for you. God Bless!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and I shall pray for you in turn. I'm used to people turning towards the Catholic church as they become more legalistic and hard of heart, so your answer caught me by surprise. I also believe in a God that may have a different answer for each one of us, and so I feel that the answer for me at this time might be something like a small men's Bible study group. Christ be with you always.
Sure. It's not just atheists here. There's a fair number of Christians (Catholic, Protestant, some Orthodox). There's some Muslims and Jews. Hindus, if you count reincarnation as an afterlife. Probably some that I have missed.
The way i like to think of this is along the lines of mathematics as usual. Because everything we observe in this universe so far adheres to mathematics except the inside of a blackhole, what happens after death also remains one of the many infinite possibilities. one possibility is that nothing happens and you are just gone gone. Another possibility is that you get reincarnated based on your karma. Another possibility is that you go to heaven or hell. Another possibility is that something entirely different happens as soon as you step outside this spacetime continuum because death takes you outside this thing for sure. There could be another infinite list of possibilities that none of the religions and none of the humans have accounted for
If there’s an afterlife, then doesn’t it trivialise death? Maybe that’s the point.
You can find some on the right wing catholic rationalist community on substack, I say without a hint of irony. The topic of the day is whether cloud droplets preferentially scatter forward, as pertains to the miracle at fatima
Yes, many.
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
What if that's the hell or heaven some of us were told about? If you live a good life, having it flashed in front of you could be a calming thing, but if you've been a person that caused lots of pain to other people, being reminded of it in the last few seconds of your life — that's a hellish experience. However, what if you've been a generally good person but were a subject of rape or some heinous crimes — having to relive that again... that's even worse than hell..
I wonder if it also happens to people with aphantasia, who are unable to visualize things in their head.
The article doesn’t specifically mention activity in the visual cortex, just waves associated with memory retrieval.
A dataset of one (1), eh? And epileptic to boot.
It always starts with 1 :)
An interesting question that arises naturally but is entirely unaddressed in the article is “why (and how) would evolution select for this kind of final behaviour?” Given that by definition the process of death occurs well after the phase of out-reproducing others, how would evolution even have an opportunity to select for this “closing of the curtains” moment. It would have to be the byproduct of something that enhances reproductive fitness during the fertile period or extends that period of fertility. Maybe those who have less traumatic near-death-experiences go on to have children (or more children) than those who faced a nihilistic experience? That really seems to be utterly marginal and likely to be swamped by genetic drift. Also remember that arguably it’s the genes that are using us to procreate, not the other way around (selfish gene hypothesis). I really don’t understand how this could arise, and insofar as I don’t understand how it could arise, I’m fairly skeptical that it’s actually occurring (slightly skewed take on scientific empiricism I know, but I’m a Bayesian at heart).
I read an article a while back, than when something really bad happens to the body, the brain looks back into memories to "see" how to solve the problem - maybe it happened before and it will know what to do (like when you cut yourself the second time, you know exactly what to do).
But because it never encountered something like it, it cannot find a solution.
And apparently this is why people when they die see their life flashing before their eyes.
Wouldn't your life flash before your eyes on every new bad event then? Like your first cut?
I guess the example I gave was a bit dumb.
A good example of what we call a "just so" theory.
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
I always figured it's cerebral death spasms which will cause experiences encoded to those patterns or neurons.
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? :-)
What's the evidence for the brain being "programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal"?
Not surprising to anyone who has had a near death experience….
I the k in cases like this we (researchers) see what their looking for to see.
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.
The word "speculated" is doing heavy lifting here.
Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.
Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.
imagine your life is flashing before your eyes and you're remembering reading this comment
What if reading this comment is the life flashing before your eyes?
Thanks a lot, goopypoop, I hate it.
> “Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling – and then it's just one case. So we can't make very big assumptions and claims based on this case. ..."
It is the brain uploading it's memories to the afterlife.
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