When I came home recently, I saw a dead mouse in my driveway, lying on its back with it's feet in the air, motionless, surely having been killed by my cat. I was going to move it out of the driveway, but it came to life and ran into some yard debris, with my cat chasing it.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-07/uol-nea070121.php
News Release 1-Jul-2021
A study in the journal Brain Communications by Danish and Belgian researchers attributes for the first time a biological purpose to near-death experiences (NDEs)
University of Liege
Near-death experiences are known from all parts of the world, various times and numerous cultural backgrounds. This universality suggests they may have a biological origin and purpose, but exactly what this could be has been largely unexplored.
A new study conducted jointly by the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and the University of Liege (Belgium) and published in Brain Communications shows how near-death experiences in humans may have arisen from evolutionary mechanisms.
"Adhering to a preregistered protocol, we investigated the hypothesis that thanatosis is the evolutionary origin of near-death experiences", says Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist from Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University Hospital.
When attacked by a predator, as a last resort defense mechanism, animals can feign death to improve their chances of survival, one example being the opossum. This phenomenon is termed thanatosis, also known as death-feigning or tonic immobility. "As a survival strategy," Daniel Kondziella adds, "thanatosis is probably as old as the fight-or-flight response."
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1 comment:
Thanatosis seems to be an explanation that explains nothing.It doesn't explain aspects of the NDE like peak in Darien or verdical experiences.
An animal feigns death to escape a predator and ipso facto NDE's are thereby explained.
The explanation is trying to suggest more than it actually can lift.
Thanatosis might be some kind of biological trigger to an NDE but that's a far as it can go.
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