First recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks (2022)

It's both. In smaller doses, anesthetics like propofol will leave you groggy but semi-awake and able to respond to commands. But you won't be able to form long term memories so you won't remember afterwards. This is "twilight sedation" and is what you usually get when you get a procedure like an endoscopy or colonscopy. You are somewhat awake so that you can help reposition yourself and stuff if they need you to.

In larger doses, propofol will completely eliminate consciousness. This is "general anesthesia" and what you get when you go in for a major surgical procedure. You are completely unresponsive to any stimuli.

There are levels in between these too. Consciousness is a spectrum.

As far as I know, propofol doesn't make you feel particularly good or block pain. It just kind of makes you go away. So in addition, at all levels of anesthesia, they also typically give you a narcotic like fentanyl so that you aren't suffering. They aren't just letting you scream in pain and then erasing the tape afterwards.

As someone who has had a couple of procedures where they pushed the fentanyl into the IV before the propofol, I can 100% assure that pain was the absolute last thing I was feeling. Hell, I was still high as a kite after the propofol wore off when I got home. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of metal recently unscrewed from my leg bones thinking about literally nothing in the world beyond, "holy fuck this eggnog is the best beverage I've ever had in my life I wish I could drink it forever".

The interesting thing about DMT is that it’s an ego-stripper. You have no sense of self. You are non-corporeal. Time and space are irrelevant.

People who have taken DMT find it very difficult to explain what the visions mean when they flash before your eyes. “Flash” in the sense that they are so fast and from every conceivable direction simultaneously and you can see in all directions. And beautifully purple.

Since we are beings that have a conscious “self”, we attribute these moving images to “our lives flashing before our eyes”, but I believe that to be our egotistical selves applying that after the fact.

I now believe that the human brain acts as a filter to a raw stream of collective human shared consciousness, normally out of our grasp.

What people see there is a short temporary window into everyone else’s exact same moment in time.

It’s like a back door hack into god’s admin console and you get to watch the interconnected consciousness of human existence in real time for a few minutes.

However our brains aren’t meant to run unfiltered. Our brains usually optimize and filter as much as they can to conserve energy. We notice the differences and not the usual. Our brains fill in gaps. Eventually the brain overloads as the trip runs to an end and everything goes black. A complete void overwhelms you.

The brain finally reboots and coming back is like watching an old Linux machine reboot, loading its kernel and drivers before adding the OS layers.

First you question what you are, before then discovering who you are. It’s like a process of birth but coming out of hibernation mode for fast boot.

Maybe death is the same. Returning to the collective consciousness.

Like the ant that cannot comprehend the existence of the universe or the neuron that only understands its nearest neighbors, maybe there exists a plane above human individuals as an analogy to the neuron or the ant, that we too cannot not perceive nor understand, because our brains are too small to comprehend it. Only for those fleeting moments when we overclock the system.

What if reading this comment is the life flashing before your eyes?

Do non-dying human brains show waves similar to memory flashbacks? What about dead human brains? Just thinking about that study on fMRI and dead trout.

> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up

Beating up a bully as self defence is categorically different from beating up a random bully. Neither is also necessary for the next step, which is involving authorities to establish a path to rehabiliation or incapacitation.