One of the things they told us in infantry school was, "if you get shot, don't die", meaning: don't immediately think that you're dead, because experience has shown that you might actually die from a survivable wound if you _think_ you're a goner.
Similar thing taught for offshor survival training in the north sea.
If you give up you are a gonner if you dont you may make it, and everyone who has survived had a determination to struggle on even when it looked bleak (i think the stats say something like if you are not out of the water in 5 mins you are unlikely to survive - even with a survival suit.)
They show videos of people passing out as they are airlifted out of the sea too and falling out of the sling. or passing out and drowning when they see the helicopter overhead - assuming that they dont need to fight any more.
I imagine these stats have a lot more to do with the roughness of the water than the temperature. Rough water can be extremely difficult and stressful to stay up in, especially if you're not used to it.
Also, if you get tossed off a boat in the North Sea, chances are that the water is not very calm.
It can depend on the individual, too. There's an interesting book called Swimming to Antarctica, which is a memoir by Lynne Cox, an incredible long-distance swimmer who discovered she had a talent for cold water and who (after extensive preparation) swam five miles in sub-40º water.
One of the exceptions shown was a guy who was asleep below deck when his fishing boat sank. Iirc he treaded water for a while as all crew mates succumbed one by one. He then swam to shore (miles i think) then walked several more miles to a house.
I think he collapsed on the doorstep (again having "made it") but was okay in the end.
He was not a slim guy, not sure if that helped.. but it was one of the dont give up examples. So outcomes do vary wildly.
Maybe the documentary tells more, but I just read a bbc piece on him and it seems like he gave up:
> He remembered: "I think once I accepted there was no hope of survival, I was powerless to do anything to save myself. A quiet resignation came over me."
I saw an interesting stat on this, in an article looking at 'which bullet caliber has the most stopping power' by looking at data from real shooting incidents (mostly police records).
If I remember right, the conclusion was that 50% of the time, it didn't matter what the caliber was. The person got hit, realized they'd been shot, thought they were supposed to fall down, and then did.
The other 50% did come down to the bullet caliber, lining up pretty much as you'd expect, along with some interesting stories of people who took mortal wounds from high-caliber rounds and kept fighting for a few minutes.
> 50% of the time, it didn't matter what the caliber was. The person got hit, realized they'd been shot, thought they were supposed to fall down, and then did
Something that surprised me when watching the NZ masque terrorism shooter's first-person video was how uniformly everyone shot immediately collapsed. It looked fake like a Hollywood movie, except it was real.
I have no firsthand experience with people being shot, but based on that particular footage my impression is people tend to go down hard immediately.
I'd like to think I'm someone who would fight to live, as is being discussed in this thread. But at the same time, in a situation like that where I'm completely unprepared to be shot at, I think immediately collapsing is probably the right strategy. If I keep struggling to escape I'm just gonna get shot again.
I am thinking back to the quote from Dune:
"you've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. there's an animal kind of trick. a human would remain in the trap endure the pain feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
> But at the same time, in a situation like that where I'm completely unprepared to be shot at, I think immediately collapsing is probably the right strategy. If I keep struggling to escape I'm just gonna get shot again.
In the video the shooter fires repeatedly into the piles of collapsed bodies, and there's a disturbing lack of reactions. Folks survived but I suspect most of those were just lucky to be shielded by others who weren't so lucky.
I once got kicked by a horse (shoed) and collapsed just as soon as I located help. Until then I was able to keep moving despite 5 bones being broken, and piercing through my skin, including a major nerve dangling on the outside. Most eye opening experience of my life.
I have not watched the footage of the NZ shooting. I just wanted to speak to some considerations that might drive sudden collapse. Mechanically, there's two things I'd point at:
First, a bullet wound to the heart itself, or close enough (see next point) can effectively be an off switch, in the sense that you're blowing out the hydraulic system feeding blood to the brain. Suddenly loss of flow and pressure means no oxygen getting supplied to the brain; when that happens, willpower and mindset don't mean anything.
Secondly, a rifle round tends to be moving at least twice the speed of a pistol round, bringing with it significantly more kinetic energy and hydrostatic shock, creating a much larger wound channel, more likely blowing out a critical system and/or delivering massive shock to various organs.
As far as I understand any rifle bullet of reasonable size hitting center of mass will make you go down unless you're incredibly lucky and it doesn't hit anything of value.
Imagine a peak Mike Tyson punch to the liver / lungs / kidneys / &c. that's if it doesn't straight up break your spine
Before you watch this video again or another one like it I'd like you to think hard about how the victims' relatives feel about this video existing. Peace be with you.
The records of the truly gruesome parts of human history should not simply be allowed to evaporate out of sight. These things should be treated with respect, not broadcast publicly, but treated with the sort of dignity accorded to the visual recordings we have (photos and videos) of concentration camps. These things are evidence of the worst of what we can do, and have the potential if kept proper to outlive the survivors of such tragedies providing a form of permanent memory of the tragedy they suffered.
It does not belong on YouTube, but absolutely belongs in some sort of publicly accessible archive behind the digital wall of possibly a free signup form and definitely some reminders of just what you’re about to look at. And before anyone suggests some variation of right to be forgotten, I’d counter-argue that right ends when what happens to you is a national tragedy that significantly changes the society you lived in.
That's also why we separate bodies into different categories during a mass casualty event. If someone who was shot sees the body of someone missing multiple appendages, they can go downhill real fast.
We were training with simunition (paint rounds) and were told something similar. They said that if you're hit with sim rounds ignore it because if you fall down when you're hit in training you'll instinctively fall down when hit with real rounds.
Ten minutes later I was the point man while pushing upstairs and must have been hit about 10 times and I ignored it like Superman.
My mom is a nurse and when she worked Gerontology she said the #1 predictor of a bed opening up on their ward was a family member coming in and telling their sick relative that it was, "Okay to let go".
We think we are being kind but it's the kindness of talking someone into jumping off a cliff instead of trying to climb back down.
If you want your family members to have the best chance of coming home, tell them that you are not ready for them to go and that you still need them.
> We think we are being kind but it's the kindness of talking someone into jumping off a cliff instead of trying to climb back down.
>
> If you want your family members to have the best chance of coming home, tell them that you are not ready for them to go and that you still need them.
This omits important context.
Many of these people are suffering, and will continue to suffer as long as they live. Dementia, cancer, stroke, COPD, intubation. Even though "you still need them", keeping them alive through the miracle of modern medicine may be the wrong thing to do.
I hope, when I'm ready to go, that my family follows my wishes and does not push invasive and ultimately futile interventions on me.
My elderly mother has deteriorated to be entirely dependent on carers and bed-bound, I wish we could be merciful and let her die but UK law (apparently) requires she either be starved to death - which the medics have told us is a painful, horrible death - or be kept alive, with every intervention below surgery. It's vile.
She let go, they installed a feeding tube and ensured she couldn't die with what little dignity remained at the time.
She came back, in body, but rapidly lost what little of her self that remained. But now she lies in bed her life forcibly extended each day; completely devoid of a life, and hopefully devoid of cognition.
> she said the #1 predictor of a bed opening up on their ward was a family member coming in and telling their sick relative that it was, "Okay to let go".
Wouldn’t that be because people are unlikely to say that except in the most dire circumstances?
Nope! A lot of generally healthy elderly people who had a broken bone or a normal surgery that resulted in a few days in-care and then catch a flu or pneumonia and would be visited by their families in the process.|
This is a risky state, as multiple concurrent issues increases fatalities. They already have their age, the surgery to heal from, and then throw a common infection on top of it all? You're in a red zone for survival at that point, but it's common enough and the fatalities are very low at that point unless you add in the secret ingredient.
That ingredient being a beloved family member that doesn't tend to make histrionics out of small crises, the calm and caring one of the family, you know? When that person tells you how they want you to stay but "if you need to go then go", tearfully bidding you adieu?
That's a straight up death sentence.
If your elderly family member is in a tight spot but has a decent life waiting on them to recover? Don't tell them it's okay to go. Tell them to fight like they're the third monkey on the ramp of Noah's Ark and it's starting to rain.
Then again, if they have severe issues, will never be outside of the institution again, they only have Jello night on Tuesdays to look forward to for the rest of their drooling, senile, smelly, miserable, and unfathomably uncomfortable lives, then that is when you tell them it's okay to go because literally nothing is better than where they will be if they survive.
While this is true, life at all costs is NOT always the best answer, and begging someone to hold on when they're ready for death is incredibly tragic and a little selfish on the part of the family IMO.
My grandpa has been clinging to life for the past couple of years for the benefit of his son despite the fact that he clearly doesn't fully exist on this plane anymore, and it's hard for me to watch. When I'm his age, I hope I'm surrounded by people that understand me enough to let me go when the time comes.
Hm, i was recently in a hospital room reading the pamphlets for grieving and soon to be grieving relatives and the "okay to let go" verbiage was actually recommended, although it was more directed at the family. It said it was much more common for family to be in denial, so please consult your doctor before saying goodbye i guess.
We were taught: never ever say someone is not going to make it.
The hearing can work even if no other senses work they told us and if I understood it correctly they meant these words could make the wounded person give up.
Wow... I mean armed forces all over the world recognize the concept of morale. I feel like there are aspects of that that we miss out on in everyday life, like in the media for example, concepts like "doom scrolling", and constant focus on bad news. I don't know
At the same time, I find cruel to tell a guy who’s dying that he’s going to make it. Also, often, not listen to his last wills “because he’s gonna make it”. Sometimes you just would like to go in peace, tell the good old stories, and say “That was a nice life. Thanks.”
I suspect the background is that the others do not want to face the death of one of their pals. Without some evidence, I doubt someone unconscious would die from a "he ain't gonna make it" - it's at least as likely his mates want to do something positive. Kind of a superstition that if they give him up, he'll die.
No, from what I've read, the problem was the reverse. SOP is if you are shot, first, don't die, second, get evacuated back to medical care.
because soldiers were taking survivable hits, but staying on with their buddies in the firefight while slowly bleeding out until the hit became much less survivable.
It could be other things though. Perhaps those that think they are going to die have reacted badly to injuries in the past, they are subconsciously aware that the injury is more serious to them than someone else (or that the injury is more serious than it seems). A over the top example is people that eat peanuts and think they are going to die are more likely to die and instead of attributing this to them having a deadly allergy saying it's because they thought they were going to die.
I'm mostly talking out my ass on this one, but thought I would share...
My brother is a doctor (CMO of the largest health system in a state, he was previously head of the Veterans administration for said state, Commander of the 10th medical wing in the USAF (he's a ret. Colonel - gave up the General track) , personal flight surgeon to the joint chiefs at the dod... etc...)
I asked him recently about covid related use of the ICU rooms at his facility...
and I was stunned that he answered that "we don't keep records of that"
I had been asking about who was vaxxed and not - and he said that he had several people who were vaxxed and got covid and also died, the youngest being 30, who was vaxxed but also one of his employees at the hospital.
The point though is just how much I was surprised at the statement that they aren't keeping records....
He was a field surgeon in Iraq, but I haven't talked to him about that experience much...
> I asked him recently about covid related use of the ICU rooms at his facility... and I was stunned that he answered that "we don't keep records of that"
What your brother means is that he hasn't encountered a medical or financial reason to request those reports run yet. The data is 100% being collected.
obv... I cant give up too many more details than this, but still -- I can see through it... lots of reasons I can't say... (I fucking got cease-and-desisted in the past based on comments here...)
I revealed how many cities in the US mandate and monitor every actions of your vehicle around certain buildings and require said buildings/companies to report the traffic around them... but I was more specific because I know which buildings and which cameras... because I designed some of them.....
I find that odd. Here they do track covid ICU nationally and covid even have them separated (they don't mix covid patients with car crashes). The lockdown was because capacities were getting full.
And they also know who is vaccinated, so the general claim doctors were saying was that vaccinated seldom end up in ICU and very rarely die. Most in serious condition are unvaccinated.
Causes of death tend to be tracked on national level too. It might be that hospital does not care, but death certificates for all kinda of stuff should be written somewhere.
The opposite effect has often been observed too. People with a mission will often managed to survive much longer than expected but then suddenly die as soon as they perceive to have accomplished that mission.
An example that comes to my mind is that of Marcel Proust, who was sickly and suffered declining health for years. In the last three years of his life, we worked relentlessly on La Recherche, his life work. He managed to finish the last volume and died shortly after.
I have seen the opposite effect in my grandmother. She is definitely not on a mission. She just wants to live as long as she could, despite outliving pretty much everyone her age group and also her children. She's never been saying "when I'm gone..." or stuff like that, like it was not a possibility. But she often liked to say to other people something along "don't do this or you will die" - i.e. "don't work too hard because you will die". People much younger than her. Never said something like that in context of herself. The only exception is recently, after my father's death she asked my mother: "will you take care of my funeral?" but then she shortly added "if you live long enough that is" or something like that. My mom is 58 and grandma is 93.
I think it's a bit like ego thing and positive feedback loop. She takes pride in her longevity.
Conversely, I have a 97 year old relative who wants nothing more than to die, and yet, nature has cruelly allowed her to linger on. When she heard Betty White died, her response was "what's her secret".
My grandmother was getting that way toward the end of her life. She lived to be 104. More precisely, she thought she lived to 104. She died a week short of her birthday, but she thought it was her birthday. We were told she cried in the morning because her family had forgotten her birthday -- we lived in the area and would have come over. Then she didn't make it to the end of the day. This story has me wondering whether mistaking the date contributed to her death.
Nope, everyone (including her) though she'd be dead within a week of her husband passing, but it's been a few years now. Married for like 75 years, since they were really young, but no kids or grandkids or anything. No one had her lasting this long.
That's a pretty grim statement. You want everyone to die? Would you mind unpacking this a bit?
I'd like this material existence I am currently experiencing to have no end (i.e., I hope I never die), so this comes as a shock. I can understand not wanting yourself to live forever, but wanting everyone to die?
Not dying would probably mean even more concentration of wealth and power. I agree with the OP. If we had some idyllic society I might be more tempted to disagree, but as it is, those with power are most likely to be able to afford the necessary treatments and I don't think they are doing a good "leader" job in this world. It would not be the humble people living ordinary lives who will profit the most from longevity treatments.
In the interest of the future of humanity, I hope we don't figure out extreme longevity anytime soon. A few more years or even decades, okay, any more and you have even more old people at the top of society with even more power.
We already have a concentration of wealth and power. It's frightening that you think the solution to that is literally ending living, breathing, and dreaming beings rather than solving the actual societal issues at hand. It is like using a nuclear explosion - with all the associated death and destruction - to hammer in a nail.
Next time we come across a fundamental social issue, should we just kill everyone involved?
We can give people long, happy lives - as long as they want - while solving societal issues on a separate track. There is no reason to use death as a sledgehammer for an issue that is not more valuable than life.
It is, actually, kind of insulting to imply that people on the opposite spectrum of the rich don't want to live long, don't want to spend time with their family, hopes and loves - that they are expendable in the name of crudely brute-forcing some arbitrary wealth equation which is apparently more important to you than their very lives.
I would be quite happy being poor and getting to spend as long as I want with the loves of my life. Being poor barely even registers compared to the upside. No amount of money can compensate for time spent with loved ones, as anyone that has experienced the death of a loved one can attest to.
Yes, I want everyone to die of natural causes after a long and fulfilling life. You're an animal. You're supposed to die. What do you hope to gain and accomplish, sitting around and consuming years after your prime has come and gone and your children have grown? Don't you know what you are? Don't you have a soul? And please don't mistake this for an argument about materialism. Do you know why you're alive?
> What do you hope to gain and accomplish, sitting around and consuming years after your prime has come and gone and your children have grown?
1. If immortality is a reality, the health issues that come with the disease of aging are likely going to make it so your 'prime' lasts forever.
2. I neither have nor want children
(Edit: Removed bits on my personal beliefs. I don't want to get into them right now. I do have views on the soul that aren't based in materialism and they result in different conclusions than yours.)
Life (with a capital "L", the entire phenomenon, not the life of an individual organism) is predicated on death and birth in order to adapt and persist. Without death there is no adaptation, without adaptation Life will perish.
We humans sometimes forget we're a part of Life, but we are, and we benefit from death just as much as the rest of Life.
I have, but that is just one point of view, which I happen to disagree with. Given a mortal life, you have to cling to what you can carve out. You're going to die and your current ideas are all you're going to get; anyone who overthrows them is a threat to your 'legacy'.
With an immortal life -- assuming physical decay is arrested with immortality -- you have endless time to reconsider your ideas and expand on them using your wealth of knowledge and experience.
I don't see Planck's principle as inevitable, but an aberration that we can cure.
Yes, because we also control physical adaptation to a degree. Human adaptation has been disconnected from physical evolution for a long time now. How many type-1 diabetics only live now because of changes we invented our way out of?
> It often takes a new pair of eyes to see a new solution to a problem.
Why does this require death of current people and not simply more eyes that already exist?
Why is adaptation more important than life itself? The responses in this thread are so callous. Would you tell a loved one that they need to die so humanity can "adapt?"
If confronted with a society of people that live forever, but are relatively stagnant, would you propose to them that they all kill themselves every 80 years or so, so they "adapt?"
Why is adaptation more important than a life? A life is incredibly precious. Evolutionary adaptation barely works anymore and the cost in blood is immeasurable. Otherwise, adaptation can be achieved easily with technology, without costing so many people their hopes, dreams, and existence.
Living forever might not be that fun. People we know would still die for accidental reasons all the time. Maybe we can't cope with that for centuries or millennia and morale starts to take hits after a while.
I never said anything about fun. I said I don't want to ever die. 'Maybe we can't cope' sounds like a lot to take on faith. I'd rather live centuries or millenia and see for myself.
Nobody could ever live forever no matter what happens, but we might prevent people from dying from one specific cause (old age), if they don't want to.
Everything is transitory and impermanent and nature needs a garbage collector.
I'd be surprised if people didn't have some sort of instinct to die under the right circumstances just like they have an instinct to procreate under the right circumstances.
In fact I'm positive of it because people kill themselves sometimes. What a strange phenomenon that is if you think about it. I've never understood it and can't imagine wanting to end my own life but apparently the tendency exists given the right set of circumstances.
GP said nothing about how or when they wish everyone to die. It's as banal a statement as "I wish the earth will keep spinning". If GP is in a death cult, so are the overwhelming majority of known organisms.
> Death should be a personal choice.
This almost sounds like a satire of Western toxic individualism taken to a supernatural extreme. To me, the pursuit of immortality looks a lot more like a death cult than the acceptance of our finitude does.
You don't even need to die for that; I think a lot of people have experienced a situation at least once in their life where after a period of intense work or stress, or not long after their vacation starts, they got sick. I'm not talking about being overworked so much, but flu-like symptoms.
It's like your mind finally allows your body (and mind?) to relax, and it finally processes a lot of things it's been saving up. This isn't a very scientific comment, very anecdotal, but I believe it's not uncommon.
Heart attacks in the first year after retirement are a thing too:
"Among 5,422 individuals in the study, those who had retired were 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who were still working. The increase was more pronounced during the first year after retirement, and leveled off after that."
Retirement is quite stressful for many. Suddenly having to come up with something to do every single day can cause anxiety. Most of us have recent experience with how stressful it can be to simply not visit a familiar group of people every day. The loss of stability of the 5x8 routine can cause anxiety, which may be a tipping point for borderline health issues. The loss of accountability can tip vices as well. Weekend drinkers don't always responsibly handle every day suddenly being a Saturday.
This is an incredible statistic, and quite counter intuitive…. Goes to show that stress can come from any kind of change, even if that change seems to remove a major amount of expected work
Perhaps weaning off of work would be better than cold turkey retiring?
Stress is very much not the same thing as work. My experience is that the most stressful times for me are the times when I'm suffering uncertainty over what I should do, or have a seemingly irreconcilable conflict of priorities, or when someone is in a bad situation and I can't do anything. The least stressful times are when I'm in the zone working hard ("work" being anything that needs focus, so might include play!).
The stress can be particularly bad for those that had no choice but to retire (due to health, job loss, or other reasons). Moving from working for money, and potentially being able to increase your income if needed, to a fixed income is tough for most people. Particularly if it was a sudden retirement and they realize the full implications of that after they retire.
"...those who had retired were 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke..." (italics added)
My first thought - many retirees' daily routines suddenly included far more / longer periods of inactivity. Which changed their potential health issues related to blood clots into very real health issues related to blood clots.
Did they account for the 'sick quitter' bias? I know of people who were forced into retirement due to ill health and died shortly thereafter, but I have a hard time buying the idea that quitting work is somehow bad for you if it's something you've always wanted.
Under stress the body increases cortisol production to keep the energy level up and remain alert. When the stress subsides, the cortisol production is reduced to normal and the suppressed ills break out.
There are numerous such stories, but I tend to think it’s more selection bias than anything.
Accomplished people are almost always accomplishing things, even into late life. By definition, the last thing they accomplish is their final accomplishment. Even if deaths were randomly distributed, you’d expect to find a lot of these people dying shortly after finishing their last accomplishment.
Agreed, but I also wonder whether the couple situation increases survival because they've got someone to watch their back, e.g. if one has a fall, the other is there to call for help.
Would the legend of the ancient Greek messenger count? They raced from the site of Marathon to Athens a distance of 26.2 miles to deliver the message of a pending invasion then collapsed and died.
I’m always struck by US Grant in this regard. Suffering of debilitating cancer of throat, but convinced by Mark Twain and others his memoirs would bring financial benefit to his family after a failed business post presidency. He completed them and died a few days later, his final mission for his family.
Add Karlheinz Deschner to the list. He published the final (10th) volume of "Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums(Christianity's Criminal History)" in late 2013. 6 months later, he passed away.
In the Soviet Gulags, a lot of people would die immediately after their release. Solzhenitsyn described this phenomenon, saying they had no struggle left in life after the hell they had just gone through.
Boxers who die in the ring or shortly after usually either: didn't have enough time to rehydrate after cutting weight, were fighting too soon after taking a lot of damage, or were in a too-long fight. In almost all cases they've been failed by their corner, and often the commission.
That explains why they die, but not how they kept going when they were dying. I always remember the Nigel Benn/Gerard McClellan fight when he was touching his head after being stopped, and then collapsed in the corner.
It confuses me everytime that scientists have such difficulties accepting that the mind can have healing or destructive impact on the body by means of thoughts and emotions. After all the mind is inseperably embedded into the body (first and foremost through the brain). Actually accepting this is closer to scientific thinking than conjouring up a hypothetic sandbox the mind supposedly operates in. Instead the former is usually discarded as esoteric. Seems like scientists and physicians are at the end of the day just regular folks who happend to have spent a lot of time learning about a very small part of reality. Who can blame them for their inability to put pieces to gether and see the bigger picture.
Is this really a common position? Are there prominent neuroscientists or physicians who insist that mental activity is incapable of enormous influence on the body?
I've heard doctors say things like "she lost the will to live after her husband died". And most actual life scientists I know have a healthy regard for the limits of our knowledge.
Some of my fellow software engineers, on the other hand...
> Is this really a common position? Are there prominent neuroscientists or physicians who insist that mental activity is incapable of enormous influence on the body?
Individual doctors may say it, but as an industry, it is largely ignored.
They'll say it, but they'll rarely act on it in any meaningful way.
The larger conceit is simply that we are intuitively all kind of Cartesian, despite ourselves. It is structurally difficult not to be. I think its reasonable for even scientists in this field to not fully escape its psychological and cultural grasp.
Mental effects are unfortunately pretty hard to measure reliably or even control, so people trying to do "cold hard science" tend to disregard it. It is easy to write off claims as unscientific if they are hard to replicate in lab conditions, but it does not mean they are necessarily false.
Totally agree. It’s getting better but people still can’t wrap their head around the fact that the mind influences the body and the body influences the mind in a never ending feedback cycle. I guess thinking like this makes the whole system way too complex to analyze.
Same happens in economics. Economists often model things based on the idea that people make only rational decisions based on their own gains and nothing else. The fact that people make decisions based on many other factors gets iginredd.
Scientists go by evidence, not anecdote. If people could think themselves to death, suicide would be a lot easier to accomplish.
Just take the first case, girl goes to a doctor because she is out of breath and chest pains, tells him a tale about witchcraft, dies. What reason is there to believe that the fear of witchcraft made that happen and not all the other symptoms that point to an undiagnosed medical condition? Or maybe we should just believe witchcraft is real and can make car accidents and gun shots happen?
There is no shortage of people who want to die. And no shortage of people that do die. Every day. If this would be a real thing, it should be possible to come up with some better example than stuff that happened many decades or even centuries ago.
I guess you are correct and I agree with your reasoning, but one thing I'd like to add to the discussion as a point is that it's difficult to measure in a scientific way the proportion of people that 'state' they want to die that actually want to die for real.
Depression and anxiety are very crippling illnesses and there are times that people that are burdened by these illnesses really feel like they want to die or just disappear or stop "ticking", but when faced with a real life chance of that happening (inside an airplane with lots of turbulence going on), they shudder in terror. Sadly, scientifically measuring that intent vs statement to the point we would be able to discern if the actual intent alone could trigger bodily changes that would enable us to just 'lay down and die' is nigh on impossible, unless we find a way around our consciousness (like an out-of-ego debug "port") to measure stuff without warning our ego that we are measuring stuff. Complicated :-)
anecdotal: It's very revealing to be very depressed with occasional panic attacks. When depressed, while not necessarily wanting to die, I would simply not want to be. Yet, sometimes, a panic attack would sneak in and I would momentarily (15-60m) be terrified of dying and not being. After its passing, it would be straight back to being very depressed.
It's an awful state of being but illuminating at how much brain state matters to perception. It's obvious, but experiencing it is jarring.
For the record, I'm doing very well now, thanks SSRIs...
For real. This is a subject that I find immensely fascinating and endlessly exciting. It's massive and we're barely starting to figure out that there's a surface we can even scratch (even though some segments of study have been shouting about it for some time, even if they've been a bit inaccurate or clumsy about it).
I'm ultimately ignorant, but when you put that information beside some of the other weirdness we see in frontier physics or start to consider what that kind of thing means on various time scales and the questions that start to arise are eye opening.
It's the realm of philosophy that takes the range of information into account that really thrills me, but understanding some of the mechanics will open up new possibilities that are really exciting (if its a bit early to get that excited). Whatever. I find it exciting, and sometimes I'm amazed more people don't find it more exciting.
Every cell in a living system is evolving in a feedback loop with every single aspect of its environment. Every systematic influcence of any kind will become a signal and impact development and progression of that cell. In other words if life forms radiate photons that can be received by other life forms then in the long run this will exert some sort of evolutionary pressure to use that signal in some way which will then cause evolutionary pressure to make use of that signal with regard to its emission. Take anything. So if there are quantum effects on atoms and hence cells, then it makes sense to hypothesize that systematic utilization will have evolved. I find this totally intuitive. And yet, even educated people will laugh at you for formulating such a farfetched idea.
Ah yes, a bunch of silver-spooned layabouts, who happened to be able to read and write thousands of years ago, serve as a monument to man's ability to convince himself he's not just a sack of meat that's slowly rotting, thought by pointless thought -- and not just the collected writings of amateur poets who had no sense of prose.
There is no mind. There is no body. Any separation and categorization of groups of ever swapped-out atoms is arbitrary.
To a krill living in the ocean, there is no mind, or body, or any such nonsense about thought. There is simply food and not food.
To the universe, there is none but itself. And itself is all there is.
Really pleased to see this perspective. Conceptual boundaries are illusory; quantum physics reveals that there are no actual boundaries between "discrete" objects, except as a matter of linguistic convenience and evolutionally-beneficial environment interaction.
Our language divides the world into discrete regions of spacetime which we assume are unchanging "things" rather than ever-changing aspects of a single unified process. And any phenomenon you could ever possibly identify could only ever be another aspect of that process.
idk, scientists have known that the mind influences the body (placebo/nocebo effect, physical symptoms passed off as anxiety, stress worse than smoking), and poor physical health lead to pains and energy issues as well as the gut-brain connection. I don’t think anyone doubts that good mental health leads to good physical health and vice versa.
But your mind cannot perform miracles. Most of the examples in this article and others are likely coincidences. There are many people who desperately wanted to kill themselves but couldn’t, and people who by all means should have wanted to live but unexpectedly passed away.
Kind of like how the mind is inseparable from the body, science is inseparable from human bias and fallacies.
On the other hand, the subject of certain chronic illnesses seems to be characterized by very real suffering followed by frustration at modern medicine for insisting on psychosomaticism as a leading hypothesis.
Imagine suffering from fibromyalgia, CFS or a similar condition for 15 years and then just once taking 2000mg of vitamin B1 and having all symptoms relieved immediately. One wonders if medicine is not led astray by the insistence on bleeding-edge research.
It doesn’t confuse me, is just super disappointing. What you are saying is certainly real, that the mind has healing and destructive capabilities.
It’s interesting you say this stance may actually be more ‘scientific’. My grandmother had a large part in my upbringing, and she was a life long Christian Scientist (not to be confused with Scientology). She raised me on its principals. They are hard to articulate concisely, but your words are pretty close.
It’s almost like scientists want to ignore Mind, and try to describe the world only in terms of matter. They believe matter, all on its own, contains all the answers and all the Intelligence of the universe.
A Christian Scientist on the other hand, believes Mind is everything and matter is nothing. Love, Wisdom, Intelligence are all properties of Mind. So no wonder others are surprised or confused when it’s power over the material world is clearly demonstrated.
Sometimes I wonder if modern science has actually proven that matter is ‘nothing’. Think about it, if you look at an atom close enough under a powerful microscope, it becomes clear that it’s actually almost 100% open space!
> It’s almost like scientists want to ignore Mind, and try to describe the world only in terms of matter
It's not a matter of scientists wanting that, and plenty of scientists have quite overt beliefs about non-material truth.
However, science, in the modern, systematic sense is about a process which is entirely concerned with testable predictive models of the relation of observable material facts. Non-material potential truth that is not materializable in the form of testable material predictions may or may not exist, and may or may not be interesting to a particular scientist, but is outside the domain of science.
> Think about it, if you look at an atom close enough under a powerful microscope, it becomes clear that it’s actually almost 100% open space!
No, it doesn't. The highest-resolution (new-as-in-this-year) electron microscopy techniques are sufficient to see atoms as somewhat more than point objects, but not enough to see that they are mostly empty, That they are mostly empty is part of the model produced by modern physics, and you've probably seen popularization that talked about what you would see if it was possible to see at certain granularity, but that's not the same thing as what you actually can see with the most powerful microscopes that actually exist.
On the contrary it gives me a great deal of confidence that there is no scientific consensus on this subject based on how intuitive or how obvious it seems, and that instead scientists are hesitant to come to a consensus without experimental evidence.
I think plenty of physicians have personal opinions and hypotheses about the impact of the brain on the body, but it's something incredibly difficult to validate or refute, experiments are very hard to carry out on this subject, and consequently the responsible thing for a scientist to do is to avoid making conclusions or coming to a consensus on the basis of how nice or appealing something sounds.
If you want to hold a personal opinion on the subject, go for it... if that opinion inspires you to pursue an interest and develop a testable theory... wonderful do it. Until then, from a professional point of view it's best to avoid perpetuating an idea, no matter how strongly you believe it to be, as a well established scientific fact.
Just because science has not or cannot proven a concept, does not mean that concept is not real. That’s not the same as disproving a concept though science.
Don’t let double-blind, placebo controlled, peer reviewed studies with sufficient n limit your understanding of reality. There are aspects of reality which have not been and never will be tested with the scientific method.
I never said anything about proving or disproving. People are welcome to believe anything they'd like to on whatever basis they choose to... if you like Chinese medicine, go for it. Think drinking that awful cough medicine will make you feel better? Fine... Want to see a naturopath or chiropractor to perform vertebral subluxation to cure your back pain? Have at it... All of these practices sound very convincing, intuitive, and are almost common sense to billions of people, and I'm glad that professional doctors and scientists reject them regardless of how appealing they sound because none of them can be experimentally verified.
The fact that they are rejected does not mean that they don't work or have been proven to be ineffective, it means that they are not established scientific facts and as such it's absolutely dangerous to have physicians or other scientists promoting ideas as scientific fact or using said ideas as the basis for their professional practice.
It's not at all clear that this can't be measured, tested, or replicated.
Also, scientists are human - they are allowed to have opinions and ideas that aren't yet backed by evidence, as long as they do not present them as scientific ideas. Science isn't a religion where you take some sort of oath.
No, OP is absolutely correct. We have open-label studies come out all the time (one posted here a few days ago about a long covid treatment) making grandiose claims and not taking into account the placebo effect at all. And many physicians and scientists are particularly bad at this, believing that stress and emotions can't cause significant physical illness. I can't count the number I've talked to who have bizarre ideas about this, including many of the top scientists working on certain diseases (of which I've suffered myself). I'm not going to post any examples here as I don't want to get into a mud slinging match.
Literally everyone in these comments has an anecdote, but I remain skeptical. The jump from reduced-dopamine-production to heart-stops-beating is a little hand-wavy.
What is the concrete mechanism? For instance in the opening anecdote in the article, what did the girl die of?
Also I’m put off by statements like “this ability to construct a meaningful (or even possible) path into the future is related to our dopamine circuits”. This has the patina of science, but “is related to” is pretty nebulous and “dopamine circuits” are constructs of the scientists model rather than physical processes in the brain.
Our expectation of pain actually affects experienced chronic pain. Because it isn't strictly bodily damage that is responsible for "feeling" pain, it is also how our brain processes that sensory information. This is how acute pain becomes chronic, the brain "overfits" for detecting that sensory input from the nerves to try to bring our attention to it more and more, as this might have been evolutionarily helpful. But when under treatment during this era of modern medicine, dwelling on the pain or feeling helpless about it we allow our brain to prioritize the signals as a stressor and increase the "pain volume" which ends up being counterproductive to our daily lives.
Learning this has allowed me to significantly reduce pain medication intake and increase physical activity. Measured and steady physical activity is often the solution for chronic pain, when convention and intuition dictates that rest is the solution. This leads to a cycle of increased stiffness and lack of mobility. Pain isn't "just in your head" but understanding that the pain experience can be mediated in more ways than solely just medication (thankful as I am for it) is empowering and hope inducing.
So all that is to say that I am not surprised if it turns out our mind can affect our body in the ways stated in this article.
I doubt that in any such cases there has been a complex post-mortem investigation to accurately determine the cause of death.
My father died in this way, but I do not know how.
My mother died suddenly due to a stroke. My father obviously became very sad and he said that he had always wished to die simultaneously with her. After less than a week he was dead too.
At that time he had a form of cancer and it was expected that he will live less than a year, but there was no sign that he might die so quickly.
He did not change any of his habits, e.g. he ate exactly like before. During the last 3 days he was hospitalized and apparently he was well taken care of, but that did not help.
Nevertheless, a week was enough for his wish to become true. It seems that he had some sort of renal failure and he died during the night, but how that happened is unknown.
In any case, after this personal experience I have no doubt that people can die when they are convinced that they should.
I hesitate to respond - I lost my dad to cancer and by no means do I want to trivialize anyone’s death. So with all respect and sympathy for your personal loss, that’s not a rigorous analysis.
Had your father not died shortly after your mother he wouldn’t be a data point against the hypothesis, he simply wouldn’t have been included in the dataset.
So if we only are including those who die shortly after an event, what might otherwise have been dismissed as coincidental now looks conclusive.
I agree that is impossible to be certain of a causal relationship between his wish to die and his rapid death.
Nevertheless, as a witness of how that happened, I find it hard to believe otherwise.
Even if he was already ill, until that week the evolution of the cancer had been extremely slow during a couple of years and there had been no signs that the previous forecasts about his remaining lifetime might need any revision.
His condition has deteriorated abruptly in his last 4 days, without any apparent external causes, besides his sadness and wish to die, so I cannot see any other plausible explanation.
While a temporal coincidence cannot be excluded, the circumstances were such that I consider this as extremely unlikely.
Maybe if he had not been already ill, a death wish might not have been able to result in actual death and a weakened body is necessary for the mental state to have a such great influence.
I would have thought depression and demoralized would have been flipped. Like one could be demoralized in an area without being depressed.
I'm completely demoralized at work and have mostly stopped caring about it. But I find enjoyment in many things outside of work. Basically, I've become a terrible employee now that I see that the company (really all companies) will not stop lying and now focus most of my energy on hobbies outside of work.
When a husband or wife of 40 to 50 years dies, many times it seems the surviving spouse dies within the year, even when they were healthy at the time of death of the first spouse.
I worked in a retirement home and sometimes witnessed the inverse: a husband or wife dies (more often a husband) and the surviving spouse feels liberated and rejuvenated as if decades of weight have been lifted, and they spring to life making new friends and appear generally more happy and healthy.
It’s still a processes — there’s a period of grief and adjustment but I’ve seen it happen a few times.
This happened to my grandparents. My grandmother was a kind of hypochondriac who had been claiming she was on the verge of death for 30 years. But she wasn't without health problems -- overweight, diabetic, smoker. But she kept going, nevertheless. Then my grandfather died, and she followed about a year later. I really can't help but think he was keeping her going at the end.
> As it happened, the woman had been born on Friday the 13th in Florida's Okefenokee Swamp. The midwife who'd delivered her had also delivered two other children that day. She told the girls' parents that all three children had been hexed. The first girl would die before her sixteenth birthday. The second would die before her twenty-first. The third—the woman in this hospital—would die before she turned twenty-three.
I'm sorry to get off-topic, but what kind of midwife would do such a thing? Other than "a character in a made-up story", that is.
Exactly: multiple friends of mine had grandparents who explicitly were saying they were only holding on for long enough to see a great-grandchild being born, or a grand-child get married, or something along those lines, and who then passed away a few weeks after that milestone was reached. Based on that kind of anecdata I too believe in the impact of belief on health. It is just this particular story that raises a few questions.
> But sometimes the threat — or the perception of it — doesn't pass. In that case, a person can lose hope of escape and, "the prefrontal cortex deliberately inhibits the production of dopamine in the basal ganglia to well below its functional level," says Leach. "That's associated with the feeling of hopelessness." If this continues for too long, it can become impossible to restart dopamine production. The person in this situation begins a "spiral of disengagement,"
> As it happened, the first girl was killed in a car accident on the day before her sixteenth birthday. The second girl made it to her twenty-first birthday. She thought the spell was broken, so she went out to celebrate, but at the bar a fight broke out, a gun went off, and she was also killed.
I am skeptical. Did they write down this hex before the deaths happened?
I stopped reading at the end of that obviously fake anecdote, how much credibility can the rest of the article have if they actually believe that story.
The doctors don't believe the story. The woman does. The doctors believe that the woman's belief caused her early death, but that's independent of whether they accept that story as true - people (the woman) can convince themselves of a lot of things.
In the Dark Souls series, NPCs in the world will succumb to the undead curse, that universe’s rough equivalent of death, after they’ve become completely satisfied with their life, or have had their main purpose fulfilled or removed in some way.
Senescence is not a disease or a result of disease, although diseases can also be a symptom of it. Both males and females go through a senescent stage before dying-the males after mating, the females while brooding eggs and after the eggs hatch.
The term for that is "going hollow". This is used in great effect in a specific point of the series (in rot13 to not spoil):
Gur svany svtug vf ntnvafg Tnry, gung'f orra frnepuvat sbe "gur oybbq bs gur qnex fbhy" fb gur tvey gung ur cebgrpgf pna cnvag n arj jbeyq. Ur jrag gb gur evatrq pvgl, sbhaq gur cltzvrf gung ner fhccbfrq gb pneel gung oybbq, naq sbhaq bhg gung gurve oybbq unq eha qel. Fb ur ngr gurz. Jura lbh ernpu unys bs uvf UC one, n phgfprar cynlf va juvpu ur oyrrqf ba uvf fjbeq, naq fnlf "Vf guvf gur oybbq? Gur oybbq bs gur qnex fbhyf?". Gur svtugf fgnegf ntnva, guvf gvzr jvgu Tnry svtugvat abg yvxr na raentrq ornfg ohg yvxr n zna ng uvf crnx. Ng guvf cbvag, ur nyfb orpbzrf ubyybj. Ur unf nppbzcyvfurq uvf tbny, naq gur ynfg guvat gb qb vf gb chg hc n tbbq svtug orsber qlvat sbe gur arj jbeyq naq gur tvey.
That was, to me, one of the most touching moment in the series.
Or they have just given up, and turn into mindless Hollows. The overarching philosophy of the series being that you will become forgotten dust in a world even the Gods have abandoned, yet you keep fighting with every ounce of your what little soul remains in you.
This oppressively nihilistic atmosphere has given many players solace during difficult times.
I expect that as the Jackpot progresses, we'll see a lot more people dying of dysexistential syndrome, even making up a substantial proportion of the death toll from climate-related disasters, crop failures, pandemics, and wars.
For anyone who doesn't follow I assume your reference to the "Jackpot" is a reference to the William Gibson novel "The peripheral" and its sequel where a vague, not disclosed to the reader series of disasters wipes out most of Earth's population in the 21st century. In the novels human society seems to have gotten too complex to be run by humans without such disasters. The only solution may be to create benevolent A.I. to run things for us.
Mmmh, no, the Jackpot (in the Peripheral) was mostly climate-related, not due to excessive social complexity. The series of disasters is left vague because no one disaster by itself was very important. AI isn't very important to the story, either; the post-Jackpot society is run by kleptocrats.
I'm pretty confident they never indicate The Jackpot is mostly climate related in The Peripheral. It's a number of vague things like disease and climate change and war-- not any single thing.
Also there's a review of the second book in the series, Agency, which convincingly argues the theme of the latter book is, given increasing human social complexity, we need an A.I. to tell us what to do. I think it was this review that I read which argues it:
"What we lack in the present moment is what Fredric Jameson called a cognitive map of the world. Such a map would be a guide to our world’s vast, ever-increasing complexity, so that reality might again be grasped and understood. This is what Eunice provides. She supplements human consciousness with the ability to understand our immense world and thus act intelligently within it. Finally, here is someone who knows what she’s doing. In this sense, superintelligent AI is a huge relief."
Also, per the second book kleptocrats aren't really running things, the A.I. enhanced "post human" character Lowbeer is the only one keeping things stable. She can expand her lifespan through technology for a while but not indefinitely. When she's gone one day things are bound to get ugly.
Even in the first book The Peripheral it's pretty clear the Kleptocrats are using predictive A.I. to prevent any threats to their power.
I'm wondering what could really prevent this for someone thinking they will surely die at some time. Someone close to me (who doesn't have a physiological illness) literally/obsessively thinks that she'll die at the age 40 (5 years to go) and I have trouble convincing her that she won't. After reading this, I'm more concerned. Any recommendations?
If she believes she's under a voodoo curse or something, maybe the best psychological treatment is to get her voodoo-uncursed, by a witchdoctor, or priest of her favorite religion, or via some other ritual. E.g. get her friends together to ritually form a "ring of protection" around her and go around 3 times to triple her time from 40 to 120 years.
This is the basis for all anxiety disorders. Fear of fear. You get into loop where you're literally scared of fear itself.
The solution is simple, death is scary. So what?
She will need to force herself to sit with that fear and become indifferent about it or even learn to like it in some way if possible. Similar to exposure with phobic people, or ignoring behaviors with OCD.
I'd recommend reading Claire Weeks Hope and Help for Your Nerves.
Also, I'd recommend not playing this game of convincing her she won't die. She's probably habituated some sort of compulsive behavior of trying to release the fear by asking you to sooth it (pretty similar to OCD handwashing when you think about it). You're only reinforcing her behavior.
Has she considered doing a month-long silent retreat, or mediated psychedelic therapy? Both have the potential to significantly restructure a person's belief system.
They're not without risks, but if you really think the alternative is that she dies in five years...
I agree. It would be impossible to convince her into the first one. And the second one isn't available in here (if it were, I'd love to try it as well).
One of the interesting aspects of human neurophysiology is that our sensory organs and limbic system are intermediated by malleable neurons. This is not true of all organisms... Most animals have far more direct, mechanical neuron connections between their senses and their biological hormonal triggers for things like aggression or fear.
This fact is a two-sided coin. On the one side... Brilliant! We can change our minds! There is nothing, physically, preventing us from becoming our most fearless selves and adapting mentally to any circumstance the universe can throw at us.
... And by the same token, we can become physiologically terrified (a fear response with actual hormonal fight or flight triggers) over things like open spaces or empty chairs because an inconvenient coincidence in the past caused our brains to burn a path from sensory input to survival instinct that (once established) can be incredibly hard to reset.
The downside to a general purpose computer is you can crash it.
My understanding is that old school physicians (maybe about 100 years ago or more) didn't consider themselves the agent of healing, but rather, assistants in the healing process. It was a part of the care for their patients, helping them with the continued will to live. Our modern medicine with its metrics measures clinical outcomes as if consciousness plays no part in outcomes, and our healthcare policies are all formed around this.
The other questions that came to mind ... at the risk of starting up something controversial:
- How much, if any, of the covid-19 deaths are co-morbid with dysexistential syndrome?
- And how much of the perceived risks to vaccination and boosters with covid-19 lead to psychogenic death?
- How much does the will to survive play in both effects from covid-19 and taking vaccines?
I think you're catching downvotes because you touched a current third rail, but you're raising valid points regarding things we already know about the interaction between human cognitive function and health.
If I inject harmless saline into your veins and tell you it's poison and will slowly kill you, you will have a physiological negative reaction if you believe me, even though the saline does nothing to change your biochemistry except some minor dilution. Your firm belief will trigger (via poorly understood subconscious processes) autonomous responses that will fight an attack on your system that isn't there. It's extremely unlikely you'll die from something like that, but we've known about the placebo effect for a while now, and the nocibo effect (a negative reaction because the patient believes the treatment causes harm) is also demonstrated in the literature.
I don't doubt that some of the public reports of negative effects from the vaccine are psychosomatic nocebo effect. This is exactly why raw VAERS statistics are a terrible source of information about the actual biological effect of a vaccine intervention... Without further information, you can't disambiguate negative or positive outcomes caused biologically by the vaccine contents from negative or positive outcomes caused by psychosomatic reaction.
Thanks for responding. I havn't caught any downvotes yet (or maybe, they disappeared into upvotes). I put that in there because I know the subject matter might become a downvote magnet ... and if it does, so be it. I'm glad you articulating the topic with more precision than I have.
As far as those outcomes goes, I don't think we are adequately tracking this, for covid-19 or for other health concerns. I have zero idea how much of this influences things with covid-19, which is why I am raising these questions. I'm more interested in seeing that these questions are asked, and whatever answers we find, they are what they are.
My own personal experience is that "psychosomatic" as a term has been used to dismiss or handwave those poorly understood mechanisms -- not necessarily with covid-19 specifically, but more in general. I'm similar to other DIY body hackers, but I work more along the lines of working with consciousness rather than something like DIY gene therapy. Some of my personal experiments yielded some results, and some have not. It's part of why these questions came up for me.
Also if you ever get shot multiple times on your body, do not look down at your wounds, if you do you will greatly increase your chances of dying right there. You have to continue on and ignore them as much as possible.
The very first episode of This American Life was about an instance where someone convinced himself for a year that he was going to die on a specific day, and then, didn't.
It won’t. It’s amazing how severely depressed people will wish themselves to not be alive for days on end and get nowhere with it. Hence suicide needs to be active. Not saying it’s the preferred way to approach things. Just that there’s more to it than a simple giving up.
My work essentially involves brainstorming new bacterial targets for antibiotics, and over the past couple years this idea has crept into my mind.
Science statisticians tend to balk at the placebo effect, and use it as kind of a “zero effect”. But, I can’t help but notice how sometimes a placebo (or more generally a positive attitude) can actually help a patient overcome an illness.
I’ve met enough people suffering from terrible bacterial infections, and from my eye, the most positive people tend to have the best outcomes. Of course, modern science would have my head for any mystical thinking.
Is it also possible that positivity is physically harder to achieve / less likely to manifest for patients whose systems are compromised in such a way that they can't overcome the infection? We are brain-body systems after all, so to me the causality seems hard to untangle.
Your observation is not at all new. A famous quote from some doctor over a century ago, "Sometimes it's more important who has the disease than what disease the patient has."
Nocebo has measurable negative effects: it is the opposite of the placebo effect. Nocebo is health problems or a worsening of symptoms, solely due to the conscious or subconscious expectation of harm.
Highly relevant to Covid vaccinations because subconsciously a lot of people fear side effects, so perhaps many anecdotal side effects are purely psychosomatic. I think psychosomatic symptoms are still truely harmful: few people can just decide to think themselves better.
For those like me that know little about the placebo effect, there's a nice episode[1] of the On Being by Krista Tippett podcast where she interviewed Erik Vance on the subject. His book is also very interesting for the uninitiated[2].
Romantic but far off topic from what it is about here?
With that, death becomes indeterministic for everybody, because unless believing that everything is predetermined, if someone will be remembered/thought off again is .. (even with the clacks thing btw).
And then also, what about people living, and noone ever thinking of them, are they dead too? :s
“When do you think people die? When they are shot through the heart by the bullet of a pistol?
No. When they are ravaged by an incurable disease?
No. When they drink a soup made from a poisonous mushroom!? No! It’s when… they are forgotten.”
