It wouldn’t surprise me very much if there were psychological states that seem strongly stress-mediated or can be drug-induced which feel a lot like life-reviews, or which get remembered as something like life-reviews.
The thing that I think is unlikely is that those states are particularly strongly correlated with someone actually almost dying (or like, I expect it to be a kind of specific subset of people dying, maybe indeed people who have heart-attacks in-particular). I am very skeptical that these experiences are in some sense ‘caused’ by almost dying in a way that your explanation would require:
When we fully believe that we will die (such as when we are actually about to die, or when a near-death experience gets triggered even in the absence of any physical cognitive impairment, like during a fall), we stop being immersed in the “root” active blind spot, and instead identify with, and take the vantage point of, the “true self” that we’d always been all along.
I’m curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states.
One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it’s very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob’s affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she’d been ignoring all along.
I’m pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we’d been filtering out happening in a split second. (It’s different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)
While I am pretty skeptical of most variations on this hypothesis, I do think it makes sense to distinguish between at least two different hypotheses:
People brains meaningfully re-evaluate and propagate a huge amount of evidence in a “split second” when they are close to dying
When people get close to dying their perspective shifts in a way that causes lasting psychological change, which they in-retrospect interpret as a kind of life-review, but the actual cognitive processing going on here is happening over the course of minutes and maybe hours
I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don’t reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.
The second is much more plausible to me, and I do expect near-death experience to have a large psychological effect on people, both because it is probably frequently accompanied by damage to your brain, and because it is somewhat objectively a big deal and you should update your behavior a bunch in response to it.
And while I think it’s not implausible that this processing here somewhat reliably gets misremembered and compressed into a memory of a “split second”, my best guess is to mostly just defy the data of the “split second” reports and to make the prediction that while of course near-death experiences will cause someone to reflect on their life a lot, this does not generally happen in split seconds (and to make further predictions that if you somehow asked people right after their near-death experience that they would not mention the life-review stuff if there wasn’t a strong cultural phenomenon here, and also that if you dug into the “split second” thing it would probably disappear, if any of this whole life-review phenomenon holds up).
I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don’t reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.
My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I’d thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of “thinking”, or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis.
However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it’s the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to “unsee” something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it’s something you’re supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of “unseeing”. What I’m proposing is that all the work that goes into “unseeing” halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.
This is related to the hypothesis I’d mentioned in the original post about attention being a filter, rather than a spotlight. On this view, we filter stuff out to help us survive, but this filtration process actually takes more energy than directly experiencing everything unfiltered. This would counterintuitively imply that having high precision on (/ paying attention to) a bajillion things at once might actually require less cognitive effort than our default moment-to-moment experience, and the reason this doesn’t happen by default is because we can’t navigate reality well enough to survive in this lower-cognitive-effort state.
I think we’d still need an explanation for how the memo to stop dissociating could propagate throughout one’s whole belief network so quickly. But I can pretty easily imagine non-mysterious explanations for this, e.g. something analogous to a mother’s belief network near-instantaneously getting the memo to put ~100% of their psychological and physiological effort into lifting a car off of their child. The Experience of Dying From Falls by Noyes and Kletti (sci-hub link here) describes somewhat similar experiences occurring during falls on the top of page 4.
I should also mention that on my current models, just because someone experiences a dump of all their undissociated experiences doesn’t mean that they’ll remember any of it, or that any more than a tiny minority of these undissociated experiences will have a meaningful impact on how they’ll live their lives afterward. I think it can be a lot like having a “life-changing peak experience” at a workshop and then life continuing as usual upon return.
However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it’s the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to “unsee” something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it’s something you’re supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of “unseeing”. What I’m proposing is that all the work that goes into “unseeing” halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.
That doesn’t seem to match the account in the trip report you linked, though, which seems to involve processing a lot of things in a time-consuming linear fashion. E.g.:
It took me through my best friend’s passing something like 20 times. First person. Just relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it again. And the Teafaerie is screaming “How many times do I have to do this?!”
To which the voice did not hesitate for a moment before replying, “Until you can stay present.”
It took me a few more rounds. I never lost sight of the feeling that it was trying to help me, though.
It wouldn’t surprise me very much if there were psychological states that seem strongly stress-mediated or can be drug-induced which feel a lot like life-reviews, or which get remembered as something like life-reviews.
The thing that I think is unlikely is that those states are particularly strongly correlated with someone actually almost dying (or like, I expect it to be a kind of specific subset of people dying, maybe indeed people who have heart-attacks in-particular). I am very skeptical that these experiences are in some sense ‘caused’ by almost dying in a way that your explanation would require:
I’m curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states.
One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it’s very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob’s affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she’d been ignoring all along.
I’m pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we’d been filtering out happening in a split second. (It’s different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)
While I am pretty skeptical of most variations on this hypothesis, I do think it makes sense to distinguish between at least two different hypotheses:
People brains meaningfully re-evaluate and propagate a huge amount of evidence in a “split second” when they are close to dying
When people get close to dying their perspective shifts in a way that causes lasting psychological change, which they in-retrospect interpret as a kind of life-review, but the actual cognitive processing going on here is happening over the course of minutes and maybe hours
I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don’t reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.
The second is much more plausible to me, and I do expect near-death experience to have a large psychological effect on people, both because it is probably frequently accompanied by damage to your brain, and because it is somewhat objectively a big deal and you should update your behavior a bunch in response to it.
And while I think it’s not implausible that this processing here somewhat reliably gets misremembered and compressed into a memory of a “split second”, my best guess is to mostly just defy the data of the “split second” reports and to make the prediction that while of course near-death experiences will cause someone to reflect on their life a lot, this does not generally happen in split seconds (and to make further predictions that if you somehow asked people right after their near-death experience that they would not mention the life-review stuff if there wasn’t a strong cultural phenomenon here, and also that if you dug into the “split second” thing it would probably disappear, if any of this whole life-review phenomenon holds up).
My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I’d thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of “thinking”, or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis.
However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it’s the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to “unsee” something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it’s something you’re supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of “unseeing”. What I’m proposing is that all the work that goes into “unseeing” halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.
This is related to the hypothesis I’d mentioned in the original post about attention being a filter, rather than a spotlight. On this view, we filter stuff out to help us survive, but this filtration process actually takes more energy than directly experiencing everything unfiltered. This would counterintuitively imply that having high precision on (/ paying attention to) a bajillion things at once might actually require less cognitive effort than our default moment-to-moment experience, and the reason this doesn’t happen by default is because we can’t navigate reality well enough to survive in this lower-cognitive-effort state.
I think we’d still need an explanation for how the memo to stop dissociating could propagate throughout one’s whole belief network so quickly. But I can pretty easily imagine non-mysterious explanations for this, e.g. something analogous to a mother’s belief network near-instantaneously getting the memo to put ~100% of their psychological and physiological effort into lifting a car off of their child. The Experience of Dying From Falls by Noyes and Kletti (sci-hub link here) describes somewhat similar experiences occurring during falls on the top of page 4.
I should also mention that on my current models, just because someone experiences a dump of all their undissociated experiences doesn’t mean that they’ll remember any of it, or that any more than a tiny minority of these undissociated experiences will have a meaningful impact on how they’ll live their lives afterward. I think it can be a lot like having a “life-changing peak experience” at a workshop and then life continuing as usual upon return.
That doesn’t seem to match the account in the trip report you linked, though, which seems to involve processing a lot of things in a time-consuming linear fashion. E.g.: