If consciousness and memory require a functioning brain, how can someone remember an experience that occurred while they were considered dead?
I had Kathy McDaniel, who had a near-death experience, on my podcast.
My engineering brain got stuck on a question.
Kathy described remembering who she was during her NDE. She remembered people from her life. She remembered what she experienced. And after she recovered, she remembered the experience.
That created a puzzle.
The idea that memory or consciousness may not be entirely localized to the brain has been explored scientifically. It isn't established as fact. I decided to think about what that idea might mean.
Imagine all your memories are stored in a filing cabinet.
You experience something, and put a file in the cabinet.
Later, you want to remember it, so you retrieve the file.
You remember your first car.
Open the filing cabinet.
You remember someone's face.
Open the filing cabinet.
You remember what you did yesterday.
Same filing cabinet.
Now suppose that filing cabinet isn't physically located in your body—it's in the cloud.
You have an NDE (Near Death Experience).
You are technically dead as you have no brain activity. How are you able to rememeber what happens to you during this time?
My proposed answer is that your point of reference changes.
The filing cabinet doesn't.
You can remember who you are, as you're accessing the same filing cabinet.
You experience something during the NDE.
That experience goes into the filing cabinet.
Then you recover.
Your point of reference is again, your body.
You access the filing cabinet, and the memory of the NDE is there.
Same person. Same filing cabinet. Different point of reference.
I don't know if this is in fact how memory works. What interests me is that changing one assumption gives us a different way to think about a question.
What if the filing cabinet isn't where we assume it to be? Of what is there are more than one?
Watch : What If Memories Aren't Stored in the Brain?
