![]() Therefore, CLR studies have real-world implications, as they are in search of new avenues to assist people in stressful life circumstances.ĭozens of self-reported descriptions exist of an experience that may be summarized by the idiom ‘‘my whole life flashed before my eyes”. As survivors are the main source of information on CLRs, this hints that the phenomenon might be of a high adaptive value in helping to perform rescue actions. Although a commonly accepted model of the CLR is lacking, further systematic investigations might be beneficial in order to understand AM mechanisms and functions. The compressed life review (CLR), also known as panoramic memories, total recall, replay of past experiences, or the life-review experience, is an intriguing mental phenomenon implying the extreme, yet instantaneous, manifestation of autobiographical memory (AM). ![]() The data suggest that CLR-like phenomenology may be successfully induced by triggering short-term access to the verbally cued SDMs and may be associated with specific patterns of visual activity that are not reportedly involved with deliberate autobiographical retrieval. In both conditions, stimuli caused relative visual immobilization, in contrast to listening to a single neutral phrase, and a choir of neutral phrases that led to active visual exploration. A significant similarity in eye movement patterns between a single SDM condition and a choir of SDM conditions in self-reported CLR experiencers was confirmed. The technique evoked a self-reported CLR-like experience in 10 out of 20 participants. It consists of listening to superimposed audio recordings of previously trained verbal cues to an individually composed set of self-defining memories (SDMs). A novel theoretically rooted laboratory-based experimental technique aimed to elicit the CLR-like experience with no risk to healthy participants was developed. ![]() To depart from this methodology, I considered the long-term working memory (WM), “concentric”, and “activation-based” models of memory. This research was guided by concerns over the retrospective methodology used in CLR studies. One way to do so might be to create an experiment that simulates a near-death experience while the patient is being monitored under lab conditions.The compressed life review (CLR) is a mnemonic illusion of having “your entire life flashing before your eyes”. What's more, it's not possible to confirm that the patients really had any visions as they did not live to tell the tale.īorjigin hopes in the future to collect data on hundreds more people-increasing the chances that some will actually survive. Owing to the small sample size, the authors cautioned against making wide-ranging inferences. It's not clear why two of the patients experienced these potential signs of "covert consciousness" while two did not, though Borjigin speculated their history of seizures might have primed their brains in some way. "If this part of the brain lights up, that means the patient is seeing something, can hear something, and they might feel sensations out of the body," said Borjigin, adding that the region was "on fire."īrain and heart activity were monitored, second by second, for the last few hours of the patients' life, contributing to the strength of the analysis, she added. The University of Michigan paper went further by examining in greater depth which parts of the brain lit up, with the activity detected in the "posterior cortical hot zone"-comprised of the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, which are associated with changes in consciousness. When taken off their ventilators, two of the four patients-a 24-year-old woman and a 77-year-old woman-saw increases in their heart rates as well as surges of brain waves in the gamma frequency-the fastest such brain activity, which is associated with consciousness.Įarlier studies-including a prominent paper published in 2022 about an 87-year-old man who died from a fall-have also found spikes in gamma waves in some people near the point of death. The team looked back at the records of four patients who died from cardiac arrest while on electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring.Īll four fell into comas and were removed from life support after it was determined they were beyond medical help. While not the first study of its kind, what sets the new research apart is that it's detailed in a way "that's never been done before," senior author Jimo Borjigin, whose lab is devoted to understanding the neurological basis of consciousness, told AFP. ![]() In a new paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ( PNAS), researchers at the University of Michigan found evidence of surges in brain activity associated with consciousness in two dying patients. The fact that these stories share so many elements in common and come from people from diverse cultural backgrounds points to a possible biological mechanism-one that has yet to be de-mystified by scientists.
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