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They say you will be able to see flashbacks of your life in the last seconds before death. Your whole past is replayed before your eyes until it is dying. Is it true?
What happens before the seconds of death?
It is difficult to be certain what happens near the seconds of death, because asking a dead person is like talking to a wall. Yet many people report that they have almost died. Take, for example, Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who claims to have chatted with God when he "stopped" into the afterlife. But without much valid evidence to support the veracity of these near death experiences, the best guess that researchers have so far has been to classify them with hallucinatory experiences or dreams.
So, starting from these reports, the research team from the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Israel tried to deepen the near death phenomenon and flashbacks of memories near the seconds of death. Researchers interviewed 271 people who had escaped death, and those who had been declared dead by doctors but somehow managed to come back to life. The findings reveal that many "death survivors" experience unusual recapitulation of memories nearing death moments that are completely different from what we have previously thought.
Based on the reports of study participants, near-death memory flashbacks generally do not occur chronologically (eg memories from our childhood to the second of our last breath). What happens is that memories during life are taken and played back randomly. Interestingly, the memories they witnessed can be mixed together. In addition, many participants reported experiencing a reversal of their near-death memories, but from someone else's perspective. The study also found that many of the memory flashbacks they witnessed can feel very real, and very emotional.
Why did this flashback happen?
Researchers say that the flashback phenomenon when you are near death can be caused by parts of the brain that store memories such as the prefrontal, medial temporal, and parietal cortex. These three brain regions are not prone to depletion of oxygen and blood loss during serious injury, meaning memory processing is one of the last brain functions to die. This suggests that the re-enactment of the life story takes place in the cognitive system, which may become more pronounced when the brain is under extreme physical and psychological stress.
In other words, when your past memories are replayed before your eyes, you are not really reacting out of fear to the threat of death and trying your hardest to hold on to the last vestiges of life. it is just a more extreme and concentrated version of the memory retrieval process that you are used to doing every day of your life. Thus, flashbacks of memories near the seconds of death are actually things that can happen to a lot of people.
Previous research has suggested that this phenomenon of near-death memory flashbacks is more common among people who have high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their breath and in their blood vessels after a heart attack.
