I assume there is a factual answer to this…
There is a meme (or is it trope?) that states that as you face a life threatening crisis, such as a imminent car crash, your life, or at least certain aspects of it, will flash before your eyes.
Is this is a cultural myth or is there actually some truth to it?
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
My personal anecdotal contribution to the fact finding mission: I have been in *lots *of car crashes (misspent youth) and have never had my life flash before my eyes. FWIW.
Edit: I see the above post… I hadn’t considered the flashing speed…
Does it go forwards or backwards, that’s what I want to know.
It is neither a meme* nor a trope, but it does seem to be a commonly held (or, at least, commonly entertained) belief. So far as I am aware, there is no evidence for it. People who have had near-death experiences do not generally seem to report this. (People who have actually dies, of course, cannot say).
I take the sense bob++ suggests is not really what we are talking about.
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*Except in the loose, internet sense, where something like lolcats are a meme, memes are not really a thing. They are like phlogiston, explanatory entities posited by a theory that is false (in contrast to, say, quarks, which are explanatory entities posited by a theory that is, probably, true).
Does anyone know where the notion came from, or how widespread it is?
Right - too many people forget that memes started as an analogy to genes… ideas that reproduce and spread though a population like genes reproduce and spread through a population. It’s entrenched enough that the word’s usage is correct. But remember that memes are an analogy to something observed in nature, not something that was observed in nature themselves, the cultural concepts, ideas, and behaviors promoted as ‘memes’ may not actually be memes in the genetic analogy sense because, like all analogies, this one breaks down when looked at in various ways.
I have heard people’s accounts of how time slowed down during such events, which makes me wonder that during stresses times we know about the release of adrenaline, but that takes time (seconds, but time), we also now that much of what we experience is due to economized input combined with stored knowledge to produce what we experience, Is their some ‘emergency mode’ that is still currently unknown (at least to me) that allows us fully to experience sensory input without it being enhanced by known memory, to experience life as it is actually happening? This due to a emergency circumstance? I would expect this to require large amounts of energy, too impractical to be commonly used, but there when needed.
As for one’s life flashing before one’s eyes. it may be a survival mechanism, giving one a reason to live under certain circumstances, but I have not known anyoen who has expressed this happening.
The British TV program QI put forth the suggestion that you life did indeed flash before your eyes. Quoting a Navy guy (Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort) who fell in the sea and did indeed have it happen in minute detail as he nearly drowned. They suggested it was the brain running through all experiences to try as a last ditch effort to help in the situation.
http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/qi/episodes/8/15/ (about 1/4 the way down)
more on memory and time etc When Life Flashes Before Your Eyes: A 15-Story Drop to Study the Brain's Internal Timewarp
Are you referring to basically running through the memories to give a solution tom the problem at hand, of for doing so to give the person a reason to fight to live?
I did a very quick search at Google Books. It definitely was entrenched by the end of the 19th century.
The first use I saw in the completely modern sense comes from The Cornhill Magazine - Volume 2; Volume 6 - Page 829, 1862, in “The Story of Elizabeth,” no author given.
In a more figurative sense, it appears earlier, in an 1859 issue of The London Journal: and Weekly Record of Literature, Science, and Art, Volume 29,
And even more loosely in 1836, in the June issue of The Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal, an article, no author given, “Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer,” describing his first attempt at lecturing:
I’d say it seems clear that the expression was a literary metaphor at first, which over time got sharpened into a description of the terror in any traumatic situation that might end in death and then into a literal belief of its occurrence. That’s common among sayings. So probably not any one clear origin, just a continuum of meaning and phrasing.
Another anecdote: I was in a plane crash where my last thought was “I’m going to die”. No life flashing before my eyes. Just a (justified) sense of impending doom.
Title edited to indicate subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Very interesting. Thanks.
Anyone from a non-English background know if the expression is common in other languages?
Sideways.
I came close to drowning when I was a teenager. When I realized what was happening I had a series of things flash before me. I thought of my closest family and felt a pang at the pain I knew they’d feel. I felt regret that I wasn’t going to have a wife and kids, and then I felt somewhat peaceful as I accepted what was happening. I don’t know if that peace would have remained - it was about then that I was rescued.
Exists in German too. Pretty much the same entrenched belief as in English.