Why does life flash before your eyes in a life-threatening situation?

When Tony Kofi was a 16-year-old construction apprentice in Nottingham, he fell off the third floor of the building. Time seemed to slow down tremendously, and he saw a complex series of images flash in front of his eyes.

He described it: “I saw many, many things in my mind: children I hadn’t even had before, friends I had never seen, but who are now my friends. The thing that really came to my mind was playing the instrument. ”Then Tony landed on his head and lost consciousness.

When he came to the hospital, he felt like a different person and didn’t want to go back to his previous life. Over the next few weeks, the pictures returned to his mind. He felt that he was “shown something” and that the images represented his future.

Later, Tony saw a picture of the saxophone and identified it as an instrument he had seen himself play. He used the compensation money from the accident to buy one. Now Tony Kofi is one of the UK’s most successful jazz musicians, winning the BBC Jazz Awards twice, in 2005 and 2008.

While Tony’s belief that he saw his future is rare, it is by no means uncommon for people to report seeing several scenes from their past in a fraction of a second in an emergency. After all, this is where the phrase “my life flashed before my eyes” comes from. But what explains this phenomenon? Psychologists have suggested several explanations, but I argue that the key to understanding Tony’s experience is a different interpretation of time itself.

When life flashes before our eyes

The experience of life flickering before our eyes has been told for over a century. In 1892, the Swiss geologist Albert Heim fell off a cliff during mountaineering. In his account of the fall, he wrote that “as if on a distant stage, my whole past life [played] itself in numerous scenes.”

Recently, in July 2005, a young woman named Gill Hicks was sitting near one of the bombs that exploded in the London Underground. In the minutes after the accident, he hovered on the brink of death, where, as he describes it, “my life flashed before my eyes, flickering through every scene, every happy and sad moment, everything I have ever done, said, experienced”.

In some cases, people do not see an overview of their entire lives, but a series of past experiences and events that are of special significance to them.

Explains life reviews

Perhaps surprisingly, given how common it is, very little research has been done on the “life assessment experience”. A handful of theories have been presented, but they are understandably preliminary and rather vague. For example, a group of Israeli researchers suggested in 2017 that the events in our lives may be a continuum in our minds and may come to the fore in conditions of extreme psychological and physiological stress.

Another theory is that when we are close to death, our memories suddenly “erupt” on their own, like the contents of a jump. This can be related to “cortical disinfection” – the breakdown of normal regulatory processes in the brain – in highly stressful or dangerous situations, causing a “cascade” of mental impressions.

But the outlook on life is usually described as a serene and orderly experience, in stark contrast to the chaotic series of experiences involved in blocking the cortex. And none of these theories explain how such a vast amount of information — in many cases, all the events in human life — can appear in a matter of seconds and often in a much shorter amount of time.

Thinks “in space-time.”

An alternative explanation is to think of the time in a “spatial” sense. Our usual notion of time is like an arrow moving from the past through the present towards the future, where we have only direct access to the present. But modern physics has questioned this simple linear view of time.

Indeed, since Einstein’s theory of relativity, some physicists have adopted a “spatial” view of time. They claim that we live in a static “block universe,” where time is scattered in a kind of panorama where the past, present, and future coexist. The modern physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of The Success of Time, also believes that linear time does not exist as a universal fact. This idea reflects the view of the philosopher Immanuel Kant that time is not objectively a real phenomenon but a structure of the human mind.

This may explain why some people can view the events of their entire lives in an instant. Much of previous research – including my own – has suggested that our normal perception of time is simply a product of our normal state of consciousness.

In many changed states of consciousness, time slows down so dramatically that seconds seem to stretch into minutes. this is a common feature in emergencies, as well as in deep meditation spaces, psychedelic drug experiences, and the “zone” of athletes.

The limits of understanding

But what about Tony Kof’s apparent visions of his future? Did he really see scenes from his future life? Did he see himself playing the saxophone because somehow his future as a musician was already well established?

There are apparently some mundane interpretations of Tony’s experience. Maybe he became a saxophonist, for example, simply because he saw himself playing it in a vision. But I don’t think it’s impossible for Tony to see a glimpse of what’s to come. If time does exist in the spatial sense — and if it is true that time is the structure of the human mind — then perhaps in some way future events may already exist, just as past events are still present.

Admittedly, this is very difficult to understand. But why should everything make sense to us? As I suggested in a recent book, in reality, there must be some aspects that are beyond our comprehension. After all, we are just animals with limited awareness of reality. And perhaps more than any other phenomenon, this is especially true of time.

pubg lite gfx tool mod apk