We often here this in movies or TV, usually it’s a joke, but while channel surfing tonight I came across a show about people surviving life threatening situations. One guy, who was hit by lighting, said he saw his life flash before him. Do people really experiences this? If so, any idea why?
Well, I can offer one data point.
In my near drowning several years ago, no life flash.
I’ve heard two explanations:
1; It’s the start of judgment (which sounds a little daft - as if God would not know that you aren’t actually going to die!)
2; It’s your brain frantically reviewing the past for any uiseful tips on how to get out of the current situation.
I tend to favour the second explanation .
I think it might be more useful to ask why people say this.
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It’s a folk expression, which may have been thought to be literally true at one point. I think that the expectation of being judged is a very reasonable explanation for why it gained acceptance. It has as much factual basis as the idea of the last thing a person sees before they die being imprinted somehow on their eyes.
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Having heard it often repeated, a certain type of person accepts it in a literal sense.
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Invoking this phrase becomes, for the person with a literal belief in it, a way of asserting “I certainly was close to death.”
(Of course, most people simply use it in an idiomatic way, with the same meaning.)
Maybe there just wasn’t anything sufficiently interesting.
Libertarian quote:
Originally posted by ralphy
Well, I can offer one data point.
In my near drowning several years ago, no life flash.
Maybe there just wasn’t anything sufficiently interesting.
I don’t buy it.
When I was robbed, gun to my head, I kept waiting for my life to flash, and it didn’t. Trust me, it wasn’t for lack of interesting items. 
It may have to do more about whether you are a visual person or not. I rarely see things in my mind (scenes when reading a book and the like) for me it’s more a whole feeling or word(thought) associated with a scene.
I don’t believe that there’s any truth to the “life flashing before your eyes.” My personal experience with facing death isn’t extensive, but I do have some.
I did read a book by Stanislav Grof (I think) some time back on the subject. His research concurs with my experience - it’s a sense of being very much in the moment, and definitely a different kind of consciousness… a sense that the world is perfectly made for you, and that you are a perfect part of it. There’s an acute sense that the airline seat in front of you, or whatever it is you might be looking at, will be the last thing you see. But you’re too in the moment to give much thought to other people or to your life up to this moment.
Jane
Sorry, dear. I was employing an obscure rhetorical device called a “joke”.
It’s happened to me.
I was trapped underwater once, and suddenly, thinking I was going to die, all of my successes and defeats, triumphs and regrets, unreeled in my mind’s eye; it was an instaneous inventory of my life’s final balance.
A similar thing happened to me when I fell from a third story window: in the instant it took me to reach the ground, I was able to survey every single bone in my body, thinking: “Will I break my neck? my collar bone? my shoulder? my . . . ?”
I think the phrase has become a cliche, but I know from firsthand experience that the phenomenon it describes is very real.
In my near drowning several years ago, life flash. Basically I was pinned between a canoe and a tree and was trapped underwater by the force of the current pushing against the canoe. It wasn’t my whole life, just little flashes of random events. Sort of like a very quick slide show of random photos taken at various points in your life. It has been a while, I don’t remember if it was in chronological order or not.
Geez lissener, remind to never rub you for good luck.
I’ll be back in a second. I’m going to go run around in traffic.
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Nope, no life. Lots of headlights, though.
its happened to me, its like a little slide show
My 2¢ is that it’s a moderate disassociative episode triggered by the realization that you’re about to die. Certainly many other accident accounts describe time “slowing down” and other indications of a stress-altered consciousness. Also similar episodes have been known to occur under the influence of drugs such as LSD and the dissassociative PCP.
Speaking of dissassociative episodes, have you ever walked into a room for the first time and felt overcome and dizzy by it, kind of like a bad deja-vu. It used to happen to me as a kid.
Posted a little too quickly…
Other common dissassociative episodes include Out Of Body Experiences, where patients in the operating room find themselves floating above their body on the operating table. This is likely the result of the anesthetics which are dissassociative agents themselves. A friend of my brother’s once took a bunch of cough pills containing DXM and found himself walking around for a few hours floating above his head. He also described feeling seperated from his ego and being able to look at his entire life at once.
I hae had several near deaths, but mostly by percussive force, ie, hit by a car, thrown from a motorcycle, etc…If I had the life flaching thing, I don’t remember it, but hen, my meemory is spotty at best 