I’ve heard of people with near death experiences having these calm, soothing experiences. It’s lovely that our brains do this for us.
I know there’s a natural selection, those with the best characteristics continued, and those who didn’t have the qualities to survive would pass away. But everyone dies in the end. What made it so that all brains release those chemicals to ease our last moments?
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It could also be an unintentional scaling issue. Endorphins from pain, makes sense. Same things that may signal chemically that pain is occuring(even if not specifically pain) may cause a rapid release of these same chemicals. Why dmt like chemicals then, possible misinterpretation that we are falling asleep(would be rather poetic), or possibly that the same wiring to cause the brain to assume repair is needed are happening, again just at a much more intense scale
Near death experiences… so those people survived. Had they been in fight or flight mode they probably would have died, but let’s go beyond humans and look at other animals. Several animals have a similar thing when hunted by predators. They just hit a point where they give up, and rarely on that occasion the predator leaves them alone thinking there was something wrong, or the animal was dead & they could conserve energy. So at a certain point near death you have a better chance of surviving if you do nothing than if you try to survive.
If you’ve ever watched some kids chase rabbits around a field, what happens is that eventually one of the rabbits just gives up. Just sits there, calm, not running anymore. And all the other rabbits get away. It is an evolutionary advantage for the group DNA if one individual gets caught and all the rest of the family escapes.
It may well have been in our DNA since before we climbed up into the trees.
We had received a kicker box of food at our patrol base in Afghanistan. I hadn’t eaten anything other than MREs in weeks. They had some chicken strips in the kicker box so we cooked them up. All of a sudden a rocket attack happens on our position. The potential end of life calmness let me finish my chicken strips so I could go out happy. Luckily the rockets ended up missing me. Not sure where that brain function comes from but it’s pretty nice.
Not a biologist but….
Fight or flight is triggered for things that risk killing us (typically). There is no evolutionary reason that would change because… the moment it occurs, in this instance, you die. You aren’t gaining an evolutionary advantage by feeling anything specifically when you die.
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