A handful of theories have been put forward, but they’re understandably tentative and rather vague.įor example, a group of Israeli researchers suggested in 2017 that our life events may exist as a continuum in our minds, and may come to the forefront in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress.Īnother theory is that, when we’re close to death, our memories suddenly “unload” themselves, like the contents of a skip being dumped. Perhaps surprisingly, given how common it is, the “ life review experience” has been studied very little.
Life flashes before your eyes winston series#
In some cases, people don’t see a review of their whole lives, but a series of past experiences and events that have special significance to them. In the minutes after the accident, she hovered on the brink of death where, as she describes it: “my life was flashing before my eyes, flickering through every scene, every happy and sad moment, everything I have ever done, said, experienced”. More recently, in July 2005, a young woman called Gill Hicks was sitting near one of the bombs that exploded on the London Underground. In his account of the fall, he wrote is was “as if on a distant stage, my whole past life playing itself out in numerous scenes”. In 1892, a Swiss geologist named Albert Heim fell from a precipice while mountain climbing. The experience of life flashing before one’s eyes has been reported for well over a century. After all, this is where the phrase “my life flashed before my eyes” comes from.īut what explains this phenomenon? Psychologists have proposed a number of explanations, but I’d argue the key to understanding Tony’s experience lies in a different interpretation of time itself. Though Tony’s belief that he saw into his future is uncommon, it’s by no means uncommon for people to report witnessing multiple scenes from their past during split-second emergency situations. Now, Tony Kofi is one of the UK’s most successful jazz musicians, having won the BBC Jazz awards twice, in 20. He used his compensation money from the accident to buy one. Later, Tony saw a picture of a saxophone and recognised it as the instrument he’d seen himself playing. He felt that he was “being shown something” and that the images represented his future. Over the following weeks, the images kept flashing back into his mind. When he came to at the hospital, he felt like a different person and didn’t want to return to his previous life. Then Tony landed on his head and lost consciousness.
The thing that really stuck in my mind was playing an instrument”. Time seemed to slow down massively, and he saw a complex series of images flash before his eyes.Īs he described it, “In my mind’s eye I saw many, many things: children that I hadn’t even had yet, friends that I had never seen but are now my friends. At the age of 16, when Tony Kofi was an apprentice builder living in Nottingham, he fell from the third storey of a building.
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