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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

There's an awful lot of uncritical supposition in this article. Sure, the brain MAY be recalling all the best moments of your life before you die, but there's zero evidence that that's what those recordings mean, aside from whimsy and hopefulness. It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream, and that, to me, sounds a lot more likely.

I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.

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Yeah, I didn't see any evidence in that article that it was positive - for all we know it it's the brain serving up a collection of every time you told the waiter "you too" right after they said "enjoy your meal".

yeah... I never get over how stupid I feel when I say that. I keep doing it, especially when I am already slightly flustered.

"Thank you" is the default to me, so I typically say that. It has been working out well so far. The only funny thing that I keep doing is this: we have two phrases we use when we say "see you" on the phone, and in person, and I sometimes use the phrase in person that is intended to be used for ending a phone conversation! It is pretty hilarious. I wonder if they notice or what they think about it.

Die faster, stupid brain

    uncritical supposition

I don't mind it because it's not masquerading as anything but supposition. Besides, this is the pop-sci summary of the actual source paper. If it's too pop-sci-ish for you, just read the actual source paper:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.8135...

The linked paper is, of course, not necessarily super valuable from a scientific perspective. After all, n=1 and we're talking about somebody with traumatic brain injuries who has been administrated lots of psychoactive drugs. Not a typical healthy brain. But, I found it fascinating. There is some speculation but I would call it reasoned and restrained.

I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc....

Meh, Frontiers is no worse than others. I've published in Nature. I've published in Frontiers. I have to say I had an easier time reproducing results published in "lower" tier journals than high impact journals. It is more a sign that peer-review is broken

Agreed, although with the caveat that Nature is not regarded particularly well in my discipline. In fact, most for-profit astronomy/astrophysics journals carry some stigma.

"Predatory journal" is a bit overkill. Seems like an ok journal. https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21100199831&ti...

The specific journals you refer to in the wikipedia article have dropped in popularity, but this particular one hasn't. Frontiers is a huge family of journals. Some are good, some are excellent, some not so good. I wouldn't call any of them predatory though. And even if there was controversy in 2015, 7 years can be a very long time in publication contexts.

One thing that is interesting about Frontiers is that they encourage open reviews (i.e. the review is public and accompanies the paper). This is pretty far from predatory journal behaviour.

Thanks for the more up-to-date insight! I remember receiving requests to submit and review papers to their astronomy journal when I was a PhD student, and had decidedly avoided them since then.

People describe a variety of near death experiences, including out of body experiences. A cursory Google led me to this study:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2014/10/07-worlds-largest...

"Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events. "

There is https://nderf.org/

Perhaps not even memory access, but more like the neuron activation thresholds change when oxygen, ions, etc quit flowing to them, causing random firing.

To me the 'and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal' is the key bit of uncritical supposition. As if our brains have evolved/were created to ease the transition to death. I don't know if the actual study concluded this, or if it was added as editorial.

"It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream"

Is it established that dreaming is near-random memory access? I thought the whole process of dreaming is quite far from being understood, so wouldn't it be a stretch to call it near-random, when in reality there might be pattern, but just one we do not understand yet?

Dreams are deeply weird and interesting. I was really disappointed when I took psychology that the dogma was they’re just synaptic static that maybe has something to do with long term memory formation.

I’ve had deeply odd dreams, where I’ve been told things I have no way of knowing. I’ve also had dreams where I’m near certain I was communicating with a being that was not merely a figment of my imagination. I’ve had many lucid dreams. Once I had a dream that was so lucid it felt more real than being awake. Either there is something unknown going on or I have perfect recall and am factorially more creative when asleep than awake.

I’m well aware of the standard explanation for these phenomena and its sometimes only barely plausible.

> Once I had a dream that was so lucid it felt more real than being awake.

Have you ever taken DMT? Not to imply that what you experienced was physiologically related to the drug. It’s just that being “more real” than reality is often how intense psychedelic experiences are described.

I’ve never taken any psychedelic of any sort. On the other hand the brain is basically a drug factory, among other things, so my experience may well have some overlap with psychedelic use.

Dreams being caused by random static doesn't need to mean that there isn't something transcendent, significant, or purposeful going on. For any given pet theory about what dreams "mean" or what they're "for", I just don't think there's a good way of falsifying it.

At the same time there's plenty of evidence that everyone's brain is a lot weirder and deeper than what we're consciously aware of. I think the truth just has to lie somewhere a lot spookier than dreams being essentially meaningless.

Frontiers is a predatory open access publisher, and your first assumption should always be that anything in a Frontiers journal is pay-for-play bollocks.

Not really. You fell into the trap of judging a book by its cover. That is not to distract from the fact that there were and are controversies surrounding Frontiers - you can't just lazily extrapolate from that.

It’s fine to judge things in part based on journal because self selection is involved. That doesn’t mean anything is defiantly wrong with the paper, but it is a real signal.

I should have been more specific - Frontiers being a predatory journal is more noise than signal. It's useful to have heuristics such as Beall's list, but they will never capture the subtle (and broken) complexities of academic publishing. In this specific case, in 2022, most researchers agree that the heuristic is misleading.

For more information see e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/124807/has-a-jo...

lol, Frontiers is bad. It's literally first on Wikipedia's list of predatory publishers not to cite.

Not everything in Frontiers is trash. However, that's absolutely the first assumption to make.

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