During near death experiences people seem to recall (everything in) their past lives in seconds. Never happened to me. There’s a GD on consciousness and therefore I looked up some details about human brain in the Physics Factbook:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AniciaNdabahaliye2.shtml
Got me wondering, though
How can 100 billion neurons keep all this information and how fast can the human brain process?
:smack:OH, come on. If you die at age 80, you have 80 years’ experience. Wouldn’t it take 80 years for that experience to “flash” before your eyes? Ok, maybe you’d just get the years of wakefulness. Maybe you’d get them all but really speeded up. And how fast would 80 years have to run past you at high speed in order for you to make any sense out of it? These accounts of people who had “near death” experiences are obviously of questionable validity. If nothing else, wouldn’t you imagine that conscious thought might be modulated in some way at a time that the brain is on the verge of shutting down permanently?
I don’t think the term “my life flashed before my eyes” is supposed to imply that every second of that person’s life flashed before his/her eyes. The accounts I’ve read–from people who were in death-seems-immediately impending circumstances, as well as people who claim to have had NDE’s–indicate that it’s a highpoints-lowpoints experience. Even then, it doesn’t seem to occur in real time.
I’ve had it happen when I was falling and thought I was going to hit my head and die. It was really quick, and just included a few choice moments from my 10 year old life.
I’ve never had the life flashing experience in a near death experience, but I have had the “everything slows down and you have all of the time in the world thing”.
Also once only, when I was younger I fell over and hit my head and actually saw the coloured five pointed stars beloved of cartoons when someone is stunned.
Hey, if your life DOESN’T flash before your eyes, then I guess you’ve had a pretty dull life…possibly living in a vacuum! 
Perhaps when your mind realizes that it is probably going to be erased by trauma, a sort of general reset of priorities comes into effect so that if the trauma isn’t total, the most important events are preserved and thus allowing ‘you’ to have continuity through the trauma.
Of course, that assumes some sort of really great error correction mechanism that is instantly employed upon recognition of certain trauma.
heh
Given the unknowns, I would like to believe in this.
Given my scientific bent, I have a hard time doing so.
The only time I thought I was going to die was when I was a passenger in an SUV that went off the highway and rolled several times over. What went through my mind as the event unfolded was ‘oh fuck, I hope this is not going to hurt’. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured in the accident.
I’ve been in a few near-death experiences, and at that final moment of helplessness, all I remember thinking is “oh shit!” One particular time the phrase “no atheists in foxholes” came to mind . . . and the awareness that I had refuted that phrase,
That was me in my terrible car crash. No life flashing at all. Just wanting to live and not feel pain.
But then maybe someone else’s life would flash before your eyes. Say Frank Sinatra?
Well, I can relate a personal experience if it helps at all. In March of '09, I had a near death experience. I’m deathly allergic to peanuts and a sizeable amount got slipped into a dessert I was eating at a restaurant. I didn’t have an epi-pen on me so I had to run back to my apartment, about 15 minutes away, take the shot and then get picked up by my friends I was at the restaurant with. I didn’t get treated at the hospital for another 30-40 minutes so I was in pretty bad shape by the end. I remember being on a stretcher hooked up to some IVs and being completely out of it. Everything was blurry and I could feel time slow down gradually as I got worse. I had completely accepted by that point that I was going to die. My friends say that I kept repeating “I’m sorry to waste your time” over and over but I don’t remember speaking. I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything I wanted to say but being unable to mouth any of the words. I had no concept of the time at that point (so much of this was filled in to me later) and all I could feel was the overwhelming brightness of the hospital lights. I was literally choking to death by the time I started getting IVs but I don’t remember feeling pain. I recall that I was in pain but it was as if I had accepted it so completely that I wasn’t bothered by it. All I can say is I’d prefer not to experience that again.