HYPOTHESES

Oxygen starvation

It is quite possible that there is no point in LRE. It’s just that – bizarrely – the brain begins to behave during oxygen starvation – hypoxia. And it can occur when the heart stops and oxygen-rich blood stops flowing to the brain. Hypoxia can also be caused by severe stress, when a person is about to lose consciousness. Or already lost for a moment.

British professor of medicine Dr. Paul Wallace starts from the same idea that the brain does not stop functioning “at once.” The scientist believes that the youngest, from an evolutionary point of view, structures are the first to switch off. The latest ones are more ancient.

The activation occurs in the reverse order - first, the more ancient areas of the cerebral cortex “come to life”. And at this moment, the most permanently imprinted “pictures” that had a bright emotional coloring emerge in a person’s memory. These may well be memories of important events that happened to this person.

At one time, Dr. Woless also analyzed the memories of “people from the other world.” And I discovered: scenes from life or the faces of loved ones that emerged during the “rewind” were arranged in chronological order, the opposite of how they happened in a person’s real life.

Just soda in the blood

Some scientists believe that LRE and other NDEs are chemical rather than mental phenomena. They say that these are hallucinations caused by certain substances that the body has produced to protect the brain from damage during hypoxia. Confirmation of this hypothesis was recently found by Zalika Klemenc-Ketiš from the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

Zalika monitored the condition of patients suffering from acute heart failure. Many died - medicine was powerless. But 52 were resurrected. While the patients “traveled” to the next world and back, the researcher took their blood for tests.

Of those who were resurrected, 11 people reported NDE - including “the whole life before their eyes.” In total, this is slightly less than 20 percent. Which corresponds to world statistics: according to various sources, from 8 to 20 percent of those who have come back to life talk about visiting the other world.

Zalika looked to see if there was anything strange in the blood of the resurrected. A strange thing was found. The concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide in their blood was supernaturally high - such that it could easily cause hallucinations.

By the way, mystical visions similar to NDE are sometimes visited by both climbers at high altitudes and divers diving to great depths without scuba gear. They also sometimes have a sharp increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in their blood.

This plot is quite common in films, books and any other form of storytelling. When the soul of the main character is about to depart to another world, his brain replays all the bright events from his past life. We talk about this bizarre phenomenon like this: our whole life flashed before our eyes. Western scientists have come up with the laconic name LRE (life review experiences) for this phenomenon, which can be translated as “life rewind experience.”

This phenomenon is not limited to fiction

Scientists observe in detail the experiences of people who have experienced clinical death or were in a near-death state. Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander claims that in a similar situation he spoke to God. Other people believe that this experience is confirmation of the existence of an afterlife. However, only a few managed to return from the other world and talk about their experiences. In addition, all these stories are subjective, and we cannot look inside the brain at the moment when people are in a dying state. This is why scientists have long associated LRE with hallucinations and dreams.

A new approach to assessing the phenomenon has emerged

A new scientific study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, takes a different approach to assessing LRE. According to the authors of the experiment, there is neurological evidence for the experience of rewinding life. A team of researchers led by Judith Katz, a neurologist at Hadassah University in Jerusalem, analyzed seven reports of LRE with in-depth interviews with people who had lived through this unusual experience. As a result, it was discovered that all these stories have several common elements, including those that contradict generally accepted ideas, formed largely under the influence of fiction.

Some interesting findings

For example, the order of events in a life rewind experience is not always chronological. More often, respondents reported a random order of the events they saw or their layering on top of each other. Here is what one of the participants said, who miraculously managed to avoid a meeting with death: “There is a lack of time restrictions there. I felt like I had been there for centuries. I was not placed in conditions of time or space. And although it is unrealistic to compare a minute and a millennium, all this flashed before my eyes at the same time. Strangely, my mind was able to separate these events into separate fragments.”

What are emotional experiences?

Another common element of LRE was the inclusion of deeply emotional experiences. One participant described his experience this way: “I could enter into each person and feel all the pain that he had to experience in his life. I was allowed to see this hidden part. For example, I saw and felt events from my father's life. He shared with me what happened to him in early childhood, although it was unusually difficult for him.” All interviewees noted that after the experience of rewinding life, they received significant changes in perspective regarding loved ones and important life events. According to the author of the study, this was the most interesting part of the experiment.

Can generalizations indicate the reality of a phenomenon?

The authors of the study write in their conclusion that common points in the stories of complete strangers add arguments in favor of the reality of LRE. There is no doubt that this phenomenon cannot be an invention of writers and screenwriters; it is real, but still inexplicable. To understand the life rewind experience, scientists had to identify the processes that occur in the human brain during this time. Dr. Katz and her colleagues have proposed several theories to explain this phenomenon, one of which deserves close attention.

Scientists have focused on the areas that store autobiographical memories. Note that several areas of the brain are associated with this: the prefrontal cortex, medial temporal or parietal cortex. But each of the departments that fall into this category is especially vulnerable to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation. If the heart stops, the brain immediately stops being supplied with oxygen-rich blood. It is curious that hypoxia can be caused not only by clinical death, but also by severe stress, in which a person almost loses consciousness.

Final stage of research

The authors compiled all the findings from the interviews and offered them to online volunteers who had never had the same experience. It turned out that many of the things that were identified are experienced by most people at one time or another in their lives in different contexts. These include deja vu or regret about certain events from the past. The results of the online experiment show that the LRE phenomenon is based on a change in the general neurocognitive mechanism that is inherent in the bulk of the healthy population.

This is not a brain reaction to death.

When your life flashes before your eyes, it is not the brain's reaction to death. You could call it a super-concentrated version of the mental processes that work in your brain day after day. According to researchers, there is nothing mystical here. The experience of rewinding life can occur at any moment, as soon as you face any danger.