Neuroscientist David Eagleman is guest-blogging at George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments blog this week, and in his first post he looked at research into how the mind and body react during a life-threatening situation. Covering some of his own research into ‘time dilation’ during such events, he asks whether we have latent ‘superpowers’ which are forced out by the threat of imminent death:
One interesting direction of transhumanism lies in the possibility of teasing out latent talents buried within us. In its grandest form, the question becomes: what are the possibilities for unearthing some sort of “superpowers”? The detection of exceptional abilities would not only (potentially) improve the human condition, but also give us stunning new data to draw from for our biological theories.
[M]y interest, in particular, is in time perception…a few years ago I set out to address our capacity to perceive the world in slow motion. We have all experienced (or heard described) that time seems to “slow down” during a car accident, or during other high-adrenaline situations. So my laboratory performed experiments to directly address this, and, to my slight disappointment, we could find no evidence that people could really see in slow motion. Instead, they all seemed to believe that a scary event lasted longer—but only when they were reconstructing the event retrospectively. This suggested that the duration expansion during fear was a trick of memory.
In his fascinating post, Eagleman also covers reports of complete calmness during times of danger/injury, and the common claim of the person’s life “flashing before their eyes”. It’s absorbing material, but I’m really surprised by some of his comments, such as the following in relation to the memory recall:
Does this really happen? It is difficult to know, at first blush, whether the statement is metaphorical…The question is whether it is being used metaphorically in some cases, or in all cases.
…The challenge for brain researchers is to understand whether there is a nugget of something real at the heart of these claims, something that would force a change of our views about the capacity of memory, the potential speed of running through recall, and the power of calcified memories to suddenly shoot up to consciousness. Not surprisingly, these questions have not been addressed because of the difficulty in setting up a safe and meaningful experiment.
I think David Eagleman would do well to mine the literature of Near Death Experiences…it’s a rich vein in this respect. It quite obviously answers the question as to whether “it is being used metaphorically…in all cases”. Most definitely not. NDE reports regularly feature comments such as “it’s really hard to explain how it could be possible, but I relived my entire life, in 3D panorama, in the course of a split-second, being shown how my actions had impacted on others”. Such reports can be found throughout history, so it is not a case of just being ‘primed’ by the metaphorical statement ‘my life flashed before my eyes’.
That still leaves the harder questions about how this sort of thing is actually experienced of course…
(Interesting footnote: I’ve been reading Robert Crookall’s book The Supreme Adventure before bed each night lately…and in tonight’s reading he’s covering calmness during near-death experiences/injuries, and recalled memories of the life during NDEs.)
