With the parts of the brain that store memories last to be affected as other functions fail, your life truly does flash before your eyes prior to dying.
Research on those who have had “near death” experiences suggests that the phenomenon rarely involves flashbacks in chronological order, just as happens in the movies.
Participants said that there was rarely any order to their life memories and that they seemed to come at random, and sometimes simultaneously.
Researchers from Hadassah University in Jerusalem analyzed seven accounts of such experiences, obtained from in-depth interviews. They found that many of the memories were extremely emotional.
Those involved in the study said they lost all sense of time, with memories flying back at them from all periods of their life.
One wrote: “There is not a linear progression, there is lack of time limits… It was like being there for centuries. I was not in time/space so this question also feels impossible to answer.
“A moment, and a thousand years… both and neither. It all happened at once, or some experiences within my near-death experience were going on at the same time as others, though my human mind separates them into different events”.
Another common feature were extremely emotional experiences – often from somebody else’s point of view. One respondent said: “I could individually go into each person and I could feel the pain that they had in their life… “I was allowed to see that part of them and feel for myself what they felt”.
Another said: ‘I was seeing, feeling these things about him (my father), and he was sharing with me the things of his early childhood and how things were difficult for him’. Every person in the study said they were left with a new perspective on their life events and on significant people in their lives.
The parts of the brain that hold memories are rarely susceptible to oxygen and blood loss during a serious injury. Therefore, memories truly do flash before your eyes prior to death.