Cognitive Ghosts

28:06It seems to be the only interpretation the brain can come up with to explain certain fears that are generated and the strength of those fears. So, yeah, we're in a lot of ways just along for the ride, and it's a crazy ride. There are other examples of this, like there's a tussle going on in your mind of what you want to do. I'm thinking about like when you see a really, really cute puppy. Yes, it's called cute aggression. And it is actually a pretty new area of investigation. We've known about this forever, but it's been hard to pinpoint what's going on. Cute aggression describes the feeling we have when we see something cute that goes beyond just, oh, I want to protect you.

28:53I want to keep you warm. And it turns into I'm overwhelmed by how cute these photos are or this puppy. And I just want to squeeze it. I just want to bite it and eat or eat you up. And the study of this I just love. Let me open this up because the researchers just showed people super cute things and then listened to them talk about it and they coded people's responses. And of course you're going to see the usual caretaking things. I want to protect it. I want to hold it. They just – they say appraisal utterances like, oh, that's so cute. Or maybe they'll say I want to approach it. But they might feel overwhelmed.

29:31I can't stand how cute this is. But then you go even further and you start to see things that can be coded as aggression. Like you see it and you just want to go, you want to say, you want to squeeze it. You want to pinch the cheeks. You want to eat it up. I want to eat you. Yeah. Through your gritted teeth, you speak. And in a lot of ways, this is, I think, similar to the ghost of, I want to fling myself off the edge. Right. But it's not being created by the brain as an explanation for a fear. It's being created by the brain to bring itself back down to homeostasis, that the instinct we have to protect and pay attention to and cuddle and care for cute things is so overwhelming that the neurotransmitters responsible flood the brain.

30:22And to bring itself back down to normal, it has to bring in other neurotransmitters that do the opposite effect and encourage aggressive behaviors. That's the current leading theory because we've looked at all the other options, but it's just that you see it. It's so cute, but you need to also push it away. But you also need to like hurt it because you're being overwhelmed by your desire to not hurt it. And it's very confusing. And we see this in other cases, too. Like when people get so, so overwhelmed with joy and happiness, they cry. Or something really awful happens and they laugh. I know.

30:59And it's frightening. But again, it's another kind of ghost that's created, not one that's there as an explanation, but one that's there to help right the ship to keep it going straight. Oh, you're going too far in the happiness direction. Time to cry. Oh, that was really, really awkward and terrible and tragic. And now you're laughing. Ah, shoot. But at least together they keep us normal. There's all these different versions of you that are continually fighting inside your head. You know, and on the topic of these ghosts and how there sort of seems to be multiple versions of ourselves inside ourself, another thing that happens to me a lot is the hypnic jerk.

31:37It's sometimes called a hypnagogic jerk. As I'm falling asleep, I will suddenly twitch and wake up. I have a very strong sense, a feeling that I was about to fall. In fact, I'd love to know in the comments how other people experience this. For me, it's almost always accompanied or prefaced by a dream where I'm doing something like riding a bike or climbing a tree and then suddenly I fall over and I wake up. The science tells us that the hypnic jerk occurs because when we sleep, our muscle tone and our blood pressures goes down. If our awareness isn't quite asleep yet, it's unaware of what the heck the body is doing.

32:22And as far as it knows, our body has just lost all tone and support. So that's what it feels like when we fall. So it goes, we're falling, like fix this, like brace yourself. And that's what that jerk is. What I find so weird is that for me at least, it's not just an out of nowhere falling experience. It is in my head at least the culmination of a whole dream. I've been skateboarding for 30 minutes and then suddenly I tripped and fell and that's when the jerk happened. So either my dream knew that this jerk was coming, this relaxing, my body's going to lose its muscle tone as I sleep, or it was completely caught off guard and then has confabulated a memory of an entire dream that was happening just before, an entire explanation for why I suddenly felt like I was falling.

33:17and that 30 minutes of dream has just been put into my head at that moment. You taught me something, Michael, because I had a different understanding of what was going on with the hypnic jerk. Okay, tell me. Well, okay, so I thought, but I've just checked and your one was right. So, you know, congratulations. This is not what it is. This is, if you'd ask me yesterday. Okay, but I want to hear, I want to hear what it's not. Okay, so I thought it was that at some point during your sleep cycle, it's important that your body goes into a state of essentially paralysis so that you're not flailing around and hurting yourself while you're asleep and that this is what can go wrong when if you have sometimes you can wake up where your your your mind wakes up before you come out of this state of paralysis and then these these night terrors what no wait there's a particular name for them isn't there your sleep demon or sleep paralysis right this is yes what can happen So I thought incorrectly, apparently, that what was happening was that your body was going into paralysis and to check that you were in paralysis, your body was testing, was testing it.

34:26But apparently that's not true. Was testing it out. Are we are we ready to sleep? Is the is the body shut off? Am I ready? No. Sleep paralysis is like literally the opposite of the hypnic jerk. So sleep paralysis is like a different combination of problems between these two different selves, the physical self that is relaxing or under paralysis so that while you're sleeping, you're not like flinging your arms around. And then the awareness of like your actual conscious what's happening and how am I creating a story around this? Regardless of the reason, and your one I think is more scientifically valid, it was a debunked theory.

35:07Why would your body do this? It sort of doesn't make much sense. It sounds like something's gone wrong. A lot of people have asked that question. And funny enough, the answer is that they are, these phenomena are in another way a kind of ghost. Meaning not a confabulated phantom, but something from the past that's still around, even though it's gone. like a vestigial cognition. Frederick Coolidge out of the University of Colorado, his theory is that the hypnic jerk is this old thing from evolution from back when we lived in trees. Because we don't see hypnic jerks in all animals. Now, we do see them in cats and dogs.

35:46You know, they'll startle themselves awake. We don't know what they were thinking or how it felt, though. That's the problem. We do. They were dreaming of sausages. Right. Back when we were being attacked by a predator or something. Sure, yeah. And sometimes a hypnic jerk can be associated with that too. Sometimes I've felt like in my dream like a baseball hit me and that's why I jerked. But the tree hypothesis is that back when we were living in trees, as you lost muscle tone, you could fall out of the tree. And so that jerk is a response to, oh, you better right yourself and become more stable because you're about to go into the relaxed portion of sleep where your muscles aren't constantly flexing against the tree branches.

36:28So it's like a corrective measure that we no longer need because we sleep on mattresses. Okay. So this is a different kind of ghost. I mean, there's ghosts in every direction here. There's the two versions of yourself that are mismatching, but there's also that there's this lingering memory of your ancient past. Exactly. I like that. Because actually, when we decided we were going to do an episode on cognitive ghosts, when we decided we were going to do an episode on cognitive ghosts, Michael and I took the title, went off, decided how we wanted to interpret it. And actually, one of the things that I was thinking about was this idea of things that we currently think that are actually just these hangovers, these echoes of our of our historical past.

37:13And one example I was thinking about was I have this lots of my family who are really into crystals, like sort of the healing powers of crystals. Right, right, right. Anyway, there is this great myth. I don't know if you've come across this, but if you wear amethyst, you can't get drunk. right so if you're going on a night out pop a bit of amethyst on and you'll be fine do whatever you want okay thank you for your um i i could see by your face your uh your your scorn at the very oh no yeah right all i'm saying is i've tried it doesn't work the cops don't buy it the cops don't buy it exactly thing is this is i think is a really interesting example of another type of cognitive ghost okay because actually what used to happen in ancient greece ancient rome what people would do is they would have these feasts that would last for you know hours and hours and hours and hours and hours maybe even days and if you were a kind of canny politician or a very clever noble person you would want to keep sharp during all of these feasts when there is wine flowing around all over the place.

38:23Now, important to say that actually that what they used to do is they used to slightly water down their wine. They'd have like a ratio of one to two. So it would have this slightly purple hue. So what people would do is they would have goblets that were made of amethyst. Because in that situation, when you had water in it, you could not tell when someone was holding it that they were just drinking water. What? Oh my gosh. So actually amethyst was this way to trick people into thinking that you were drinking when you were actually sober. Right. And so the fact that you're not drunk must be explained by the amethyst glass, the crystal.

39:03Right. Rather than, you know, and over time, that kind of really solid idea has morphed into something that's this echo. Another example of this is with salt, because of course, before refrigeration, salt was absolutely vital for human survival. You know, you would use it to preserve meat for the winter. It was also, by the way, incredibly expensive, difficult to harvest. The word salary even comes from the Roman practice of paying soldiers a salarium, right, an allowance to buy salt because this is the thing that would allow you to survive. That's amazing. I love that. I love sitting in a restaurant looking at the pepper being like, there's so much pepper here.

39:44people used to die for pepper right they and salt as well salt too there's so much salt i could spill this and the restaurant would just be like that's all right but it used to be that that was your salary that was your salary right exactly and so this is it because the idea of spilling salt uh it wasn't just this sort of oops moment of like oh made a bit of a mess it was this devastating financial loss and this threat to your entire family's winter food supply. So it became this idea that there would be the devil, if you spilled salt, the devil would appear. So you have to throw salt over your left shoulder because the devil is there.

40:25But what's happened is the reason for caring so much about salt has dissipated. But the remnants of our stories that we tell ourselves and each other from generation to generation to generation. This is like the oral history of something that really used to scare our ancestors. And I think that's a different kind of version of a cognitive ghost. Right. It haunts us in a more innocuous form still to this day. Totally. Totally. But you know what? I also, in interpreting this title, I also came up with a few other cognitive ghosts that happen inside the body, or maybe even outside the body. And I reckon we should come back to those after the break.

41:06All right.

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43:33Welcome back. So far, we've been talking about cognitive ghosts inside your own mind. But Hannah, you're going to tell us about some that exist outside of the mind. Well, you know, I sort of think so. I want to take ghosts a little bit more literally. I've never had the opportunity to talk about ghosts on a science podcast before. So I thought I'd run with it, frankly, Michael. Please do. And in particular, I want to talk about extreme explorers and ghostly companions that appear to them in their moments of most dire need. So there's some really famous stories about this of people who have crossed the North Pole, been up mountains, real endurance situations where they have then seen ghosts.

44:17Probably the most famous story about this is Shackleton. His ship Endurance was crushed by the Arctic ice. And so Shackleton and two of his men, they had to make this unimaginable, desperate voyage across the ocean and then trek across these glaciated mountains of South Georgia Island to find this whaling station. And while they were doing this, they were, I mean, literally starving. They were freezing. They were severely sleep deprived right at the very edge of what the body can manage. And a while later, Shackleton, I mean, they survived it astonishingly. Shackleton wrote this line where he said, it seemed to me that as they were walking across these lands, there were four notched three of us.

45:04Okay, so he had this like vision of a ghost. But the thing is, Shackleton didn't talk about this with his men. He didn't want to say to his other two men, it feels like there's another person here, until weeks later. And when he did, when he finally brought it up, it turned out that Worsley and Crean, the other guys who were with him, both confessed that they had felt the exact same invisible fourth person who was walking with them the entire time. Oh, weird. How strange is that? So T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Wasteland. And the first line is, who is the third who walks always beside you?

45:43It's this idea of the third man, the kind of the extra person who you weren't expecting to be there. Anyway, this is like such a strange question. It really perplexed people for a really long time because how is it possible that you have three separate brains hallucinating the exact same ghost being there? Yeah. And then you see this story pop up over and over again. There's another example of this Frank Smythe, who was this British mountaineer. He was attempting to summit Everest, didn't have any supplemental oxygen. It's like back in the days when they did it properly, terribly. and mostly fatally, but properly.

46:22His climbing partner had to turn back. So he was totally on his own. He's at 28 ,000 feet. He's in the death zone. And then he felt this ghost appear next to him. And the presence that Smythe felt was so visceral, so totally physical that he ended up taking his, his rational brain just couldn't handle it at all. And at one point he reached into his pocket, pulled out a bit of his rations, a bit of Kendall mint cake, broke it in half and physically turned round to hand it to the ghost. And it was only when he turned round that he realised that this ghost wasn't there. This is like so mysterious, so completely at the edge of, I mean, it's really proper ghost stories, this.

47:05But it turns out there is a really scientifically credible explanation that that covers all of this simultaneously and it turns out that when you have extreme physical exertion also if you have sensory monotony so especially if you're surrounded by snow right you're kind of staring endlessly at white snow there is this neurological glitch that happens it's in the tempo paratal junction which is the the bit of your brain that's like your conscious body schema. It's the bit that's in charge of your proprioception. You know, if your proprioception is kind of the data, the TPJ, as it's known, is the thing that kind of does the 3D rendering.

47:47It's the bit that like works out where your body is, where your body ends and the world begins. And there is this glitch that can happen in it, particularly when you're deprived of oxygen. It takes all of your own internal sensor motor skills and then mistakenly projects them outwards, outside of your body, kind of creating this hallucinated version of yourself that your brain thinks is this separate entity. And it turns out this isn't just a theory, right? This is what I think is so amazing about this, all these incredible stories from the past. It's not just a theory, because there is a team of people who have managed to replicate this in a lab setting.

48:31Oh, wow. And you, Michael, can have your very own ghost, if you like. And I can tell you how to do it. This is 2014. It's this group of neuroscientists. This is at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lusanne in Switzerland. What they decided to do, they're trying to summon this cognitive ghost. and they did it so well that they ended up freaking out loads of the participants. So what they do, you put someone in a room, you put a blindfold on them, earplugs in, so they've got kind of no visual or auditory cues. They stand in the middle of the room and in front of them, there's this robotic lever that they can push and pull with their hands.

49:11And then directly behind them, there is this secondary robotic arm. So when they first go in, they can move the lever and it moves the arm around them and then the arm sort of pokes them in the back and it all happens instantaneously. They're directly connected. Motion of the lever moves the poker behind you. Exactly. And that's, you know, it's like a bit of a weird experience, but it's fine. You know, you can kind of deal with it. It's no big deal. You're moving your own hand and you're feeling on your back, right? But it's fine. You're in charge. But when the brain gets used to that, then what the researchers did is they introduced this neuro glitch.

49:43So they add this 500 millisecond delay. That's it. Which is almost nothing. It's half a second. Half a second. Exactly. Thank you. Put it in real terms. Between the participant moving the lever and the robot on the back poking them. But because with that gap, which, you know, doesn't seem like very much, but to your brain, it's an absolute age. The brain can no longer reconcile the timeline of you're moving this thing and then you're the cause and there's the action. And so it defaults to the only plausible solution, the only plausible conclusion, which is that if I didn't cause this touch, there must be someone else in the room with me.

50:30Wow. And so all the participants, they don't just feel this mechanical poke. It's not just that, oh, I'm just getting poked. They overwhelmingly report this powerful, undeniable feeling of presence that there is someone who is standing a few inches behind them. Some people felt multiple ghosts kind of crowding around them. And this illusion was so visceral and freaky and upsetting that loads of these very healthy, very rational participants were like, I don't I don't want I don't like this. This is freaking me out and took the blindfold off because they were completely convinced that someone snuck into the lab and was tapping them on the back.

51:10Wow. Isn't that good? I so want to do that. I want to feel that experience. And so could it be possible that a delay like that can happen, not even with a mechanism, but in your own body when you're exhausted, when you're nutritionally in trouble, and suddenly you start to feel like your own behaviors are those of another presence? Exactly. To possibly explain what happened to Shackleton, what happens to these North Pole explorers. Right. And add in some starvation of oxygen to the mix. Add in the sensory deprivation of you can't really tell what's going on in the landscape. It turns out that this is something that happens.

51:52I mean, it's either that or they really did have a ghost to appear beside them. Right. Sure. It could have been a real ghost. It could have been a real ghost. I'm genuinely okay with that as another alternative explanation. It's funny how all of these things, including this one, are so related by mechanism to deja vu. Like just a little bit of a disconnect between two processes that normally work together can generate such eerie feelings. Yeah, that you can no longer explain. You just know that it feels really strange. I also took a very different interpretation of cognitive ghosts and I started to think of cognition, things we think that aren't real, that aren't really there.

52:34And I thought about tropes. I thought about how in books and movies we almost have a completely different reality, one where when someone gets electrocuted, they zap around and you can see their bones through their body. And like a lot of people truly believe that that's what happens when someone's electrocuted. Because what really happens is that your muscles completely become rigid and you look frozen. There isn't the kind of a thing. And yet in a movie or in a stage play, to show the audience what's happening, you've got to do something that's less real. You've got to have the character shake and you've got to have a zapping sound and you've got to have their, you know, their bones show through their skin like they're being x-rayed.

53:25And then everyone goes, oh, they're being electrocuted. Got it. And because we encounter fictitious depictions of electrocution so much more often than real ones, many of us come to believe the made up story version. And this is all over the place, right? When people have earpieces in because they're like a secret service agent and they're always having to like – they talk by touching the little earpiece in their ear. Obviously, they never actually do that. Like you don't need to push it to hear anything and it gives away that it exists. It would be quite a big giveaway. Exactly. But the fact that it gives it away is why they do it in movies all the time so that we watching go, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

54:05They have an earpiece in, Roger. You know, they always – they touch it. And that helps us know what they're responding to, to the point where that becomes reality for us. It's not real. It is a ghostly, made up, hyper real vision. And so then when people pretend or talk in conversation about like, I'm a spy, they'll touch their ear. But that's not a thing that spies do at all. That electrocution one, where does that even come from then? Is there like an origin to it? Because it's so, it's such a trope. I don't know. I don't know where it comes from. I mean, I'm sure there's some origin that we could look up, but there are cliches that literally don't have an origin.

54:49The website TV Tropes calls them dead unicorns. These are overused events in movies that we see now as like satire, as parody. Like the film noir detective who says, she came into my office and had legs for days. And like that has never happened straight. There's never been a movie that seriously did that. Same with the villain wrapping a damsel onto the railroad tracks. The dastardly, like that has only ever existed as a parody of villain stories. So it's a dead unicorn in that it's dead. It's been overused. It's like a dead horse. Like, oh my gosh, this again. But it's a unicorn in that it doesn't exist.

55:35It never really existed. It's a completely made up cliche. Another example would be. Oh, I know. Yeah. What about like what about the falling anvil? I gosh, I don't know. Is that I mean, how often do anvils fall on people? It would only ever happen in the you've got to be lifting an anvil up somewhere on a crane, which does happen. And I guess people just think, oh, that would be like the worst thing to have fall on you. And then suddenly the cartoons are like, yes, that's what should always be falling all the time. I don't know if you've ever even seen a real anvil in real life on the ground, let alone falling from the sky.

56:12I wanted to say that, you know, another sort of ghost that will emerge through media that leads to people misunderstanding history is that the way people talk in period films needs to make sense to us. And if we tried to make it really accurate, it could be just really confusing. So what I'm thinking of is something like the TV show Deadwood, which is set in the old American West. but yet they curse. They use swear words like the F word. And I can't really say all these words, but you can imagine what they say or go watch the show and hear them. Those words are curse words to us. But back then, if people were really going to swear up a storm, they would say things like, go darn it, and things that would just make us laugh.

57:01And so the writers of the show had to use modern day taboo words because otherwise we would be like okay he just said spalarchy that is he mad or is he a clown and they're like guys in 1860 you would have been like dang that guy's serious the other one that i i find really noticeable is um i i can't say i've watched very much of it but bridgerton which is a sort of i mean it is a very fictional account of what England was like in the 1800s, around that era. Forgive me if I haven't got the exact year right, Bridgerton fans. But what seems to happen is, rather than any sort of accurate depiction of the use of language, they just say indeed a lot.

57:45Yes. Yes, indeed. A lot of words that they would have used, we wouldn't realise were serious. Like instead of saying, I understand that all too damned well. Back in the 1860s, they would say, I understand that to Tarnal well, and it feels doesn't have the doesn't convey the emotion that it used to. So we have to just use made up unrealistic language. And then we come to think that that's the way things really are. There's a whole suite of these ghosts of reality that appear in media that we come to take to be real. In fact, there's a name for this. It's called the coconut effect. The name comes from the fact that in old radio shows, when you wanted horses to be clopping through, you'd take coconuts, right?

58:31We see this in the Monty Python movie, right? They clopped two coconut halves together and it sounds like hooves on cobblestones. Well, what wound up happening is that in the early days of movies, people were already used to hearing the clopping coconut sound for horses. then in a movie, they would have horses on like a beach walking on sand. And the producers would go, no, this is confusing. I need to hear the clopping of coconuts. And the people who knew stuff about horses said, well, no, that doesn't make that sound on sand. And they're like, yeah, but the audience expects it now. They think that that's real.

59:04So we now need to keep the lie up because otherwise they will be confused. So the coconut effect is when you have to lie in some form of communication, whether it's a movie or a radio show or a book, just to get your point across. Because to tell the truth would be confusing because we're so divorced from it. Oh my gosh. So there's all these cliches, right? I don't want to list them all, but there's things like a glitter of light makes a shing sound or a ricocheting bullet makes sparks. They don't usually, but that helps the audience see it. Or when people pull out a blade and then it makes the sound of metal on metal, despite the fact that there's no other metal there.

59:42Where's the other metal? or someone pulls a gun out and you hear the sound of like a gun being assembled. And it's like, what the heck is your gun all floppy and on hinges? Like that noise just helps alert audiences to it. And the audiences experience the representation more often than the reality. So they come to think that that's what's real. Laboratories are not full of beakers of bubbling, bright liquids. You know, when you get scared and frightened, does your life really flash before your eyes? These things kind of like are literary devices that then become... That last one may actually be true.

1:00:22Okay. I have read some about this. Do you know more about it? Okay. So for starters, it's been reported numerous times, but there is a good mechanistic potential reason for this, if you're in sort of extreme peril, you know, maximum adrenaline, things are looking really bad. It does make sense that your brain would want to rifle through all of your memories to see if there's anything useful. You know, let's say you are about to be bitten by a shark. Your brain is like, I think back to one of those Atterbury programs I watched when I was a kid. Like, is there any of them that say I should punch the shark on the nose?

1:01:00the answer yes there is um if you you find yourself in that situation but this is i mean it's quite difficult to study this thing right you can't exactly take someone and then put them in extreme peril in an mri scanner no but wait this someone did die during an mri scan did they well i'm not totally prepared to give the details but yeah there's a you can look this up uh there was a story of an elderly man who was having an MRI done and he died during the MRI and they kept recording. So they were able to see what brain activity is just before, during, and after the moment of death. It's the kind of thing you could never make happen, but it could happen accidentally.

1:01:46And the brain waves and the brain activity resembled exactly what happens when we are searching for information and remembering. No. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I didn't, I'm sorry, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Now, we don't know that that's what he was experiencing, but this whole, you know, meme, the trope of your life flashing before your eyes encourages that sort of interpretation. That whole point about leading up to your death and what your brain is doing before you die does actually lead me on to the last cognitive ghost that I wanted to talk to you about. This is something I found fascinating for such a long time because there is this well-reported effect that when people are coming towards the end of their life, particularly if they're cancer patients in palliative care or whatever it might be, but where they're sort of cognizant, awake and able to talk in the weeks and months leading up to their death, over and over again, patients will report that about a month out from dying, they will have a really, really vivid dream.

1:02:56And these dreams generally involve people who they know, who they've loved, who have already died, standing with them. There are these key themes that appear. One is this idea of a welcoming committee. This is sort of the most common vision that people have, where they're, you know, interacting with deceased loved ones, parents, spouses, old friends, whoever it might be, sometimes deceased pets too they rarely dream of people who are still alive in this this very vivid dream that they have there's also another theme is the idea of a journey so patients frequently dream that they're packing bags or they're waiting for a train or they're looking for their passport preparing for a trip in some way another theme that comes up is that patients sometimes dream about past traumas or estranged relationships but that the dreams always end in this kind of sense of forgiveness or closure.

1:03:47And for decades and decades and decades, there's been reports of this, but the medical establishment were like, no, no, no, it's just morphine. It's just hallucinations. It's just sort of chaotic. Your brain is oxygen starved. It's something you just don't worry about it. But the thing about this is that these are not rare edge cases and they are very different from delirium. So delirium is very chaotic. It's fragmented. It's kind of scary. The patient's really anxious, they're terrified. But these, they're called end of life dreams and visions. They are super lucid. They're structured. They're almost universally comforting as well.

1:04:26So about 10 years ago, Dr. Christopher Kerr, who works at hospice and palliative care in Buffalo, he started collecting these stories and he ended up quantifying the experience of 1 ,400 dying patients over the course of a decade. And he revealed that up to 88 % of patients, right, almost everybody has at least one of these dreams before they die. And they typically start with a few weeks before death. And then they can increase in frequency and vividness, right up as the patient gets closer and closer towards the end of their life. now in terms of like what is going on here it's really hard to know so the thing that we can say is um is you can put on uh eegs to collect data from from people who are in palliative care and there are a couple of theories about why this might be happening one thing that you do see from the eegs is that in the final moments or final days and weeks the brain doesn't just fade away Instead, it actually experiences this surge of gamma waves.

1:05:38And gamma waves, they're the fastest frequency of brainwaves. And they're what you get with intense concentration, essentially. They're with memory retrieval. This is what we've seen with the guy in the fMRI scanner. They're also with conscious awareness. Your brain is sort of lighting up in this electrical storm, essentially, of deep concentration, rendering these like very immersive experiences for yourself that feel very different from other dreams the theory about why this might happen though you know other than just the evidence of what's going on in the brain is that as your organs start failing maybe your body is is stopping getting all the data in from the outside world you know your eyes are failing your ears are failing touch is failing but your brain is like this prediction engine and it's trying to just fill in those gaps, right?

1:06:26Sort of it's trying to construct a version of reality. Another suggestion for this is that, you know, dying is obviously this incredibly traumatic physical event. I mean, the most traumatic physical event there is. And that maybe as your organs fail, your body is subjected to this really big levels of physiological stress. And so perhaps to protect the conscious mind from the catastrophic pain that's going on, maybe the brain is flooding itself with endogenous endorphins and sort of free analgesia and trace amounts of what effectively amounts to psychedelics. and essentially you're sort of you're chemically sedating yourself in order to to not have to sit there with the the physiological pain um that's going on but you know the true answer about why this happens is we just have no idea we just have no idea which i think is very profoundly beautiful actually because i am completely open to more spiritual interpretations of this i am i'm not We've spoken about in this podcast before, I'm not closed off to deeper, more meaningful interpretations of this.

1:07:44But I also think that it really does demonstrate that the sort of the most important moments of a person's life as they transition from being alive to being dead. There is still so much that we don't understand when you cannot ask a person, how did it feel to go through that? There is still so many unanswered questions. So as we've seen in your day-to-day life, you're not alone. There's other versions of you. There's other processes that are separate from your awareness that are all happening. But even at the end of life, you are certainly not alone. Your brain makes sure of it. And maybe we're constructing these ourselves.

1:08:26And maybe we're constructing them as a society from our history. Maybe there are echoes of what our ancestors most cared about, or we've sort of twisted the things that are real into something that isn't. Yeah, as a mechanism of protection against the trauma of organ failure, of what's happening to the body at the end of life. New presences are brought to us for the comfort they provide. Wow. Well, twice a week, Hannah and I will be here to comfort you and accompany you on your journey through this reality. I'm glad you listened today. And if you'd like to reach out, you can email us at therestisscience at goalhanger.com.

1:09:11Or sign up to our free newsletter, therestisscience.com forward slash science. Thanks for watching, and we will see you next time. See you next time.

1:09:52Thank you.

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