The redneck strike again.

[Tonus]

I don't know if this is the topic where people where discussing consciousness and NDAs, but I just started reading Dave McRaney's book You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself (yeah, really long title!) and there is an interesting paragraph in the first chapter, which deals with how we use narrative to make sense of the world around us. I broke the large paragraph up to make it easier to read:

The air force and agencies such as NASA use centrifuges to create massive g-forces in a controlled environment. This way, they can teach pilots techniques for keeping blood in their brains. Such techniques involve lots of grunting and straining, which would otherwise seem a bit embarrassing if, you know, they weren't fighter pilots. At a certain point, pilots will black out and lose consciousness. As they go in and out of this state, they often report visions, hallucinations of the fantastic and the everyday, like dreams.

James Whinnery, a medical doctor for the air force, has studied hundreds of these blackouts over the last thirty years, videotaping them and comparing their nuances, interviewing the pilots and recording their reports. Over time, he has found striking similarities to the same sorts of things reported by patients who lost consciousness on operating tables, in car crashes, and after returning from other nonbreathing states. The tunnel, the white light, friends and family coming to greet you, memories zooming around-- the pilots experienced all of this.

In addition, the centrifuge was pretty good at creating out-of-body experiences. Pilots would float over themselves, or hover nearby, looking on as their heads lurched and waggled about. As Whinnery and other researchers have speculated, the near-death and out-of-body phenomena are both actually the subjective experience of a brain owner watching as his brain tries desperately to figure out what is happening and to orient itself amid its systems going haywire due to oxygen deprivation. Without the ability to map out its borders, the brain often places consciousness outside the head, in a field, swimming in a lake, fighting a dragon-- whatever it can connect together as the walls crumble.

What the deoxygenated pilots don't experience is a smeared mess of random images and thoughts. Even as the brain is dying, it refuses to stop generating a narrative, the scaffolding upon which it weaves cause and effect, memory and experience, feeling and cognition. Narrative is so important to survival that it is literally the last thing you give up before becoming a sack of meat. It is the framework of your conscious experience. Without it, there would be nothing but noise. Better still, after the pilots regain consciousness they go through the same sort of explanatory routines as patients in emergency rooms who have technically died and returned to life. The stories differ, depending on the belief system, but there is always a story.