Grim research

i need to have my carotid checked

 

I'm interested in the post-shutdown procedures....

 

Sounds familiar, although once I'm out of the OEM warranty period I'm not sure that there will be any useful pieces/parts left to scavenge.

I told my CFO to arrange to have my ashes shot out of a torpedo tube or, probably much more likely, a submarine TDU (Trash Disposal Unit.)

This request was rejected with authority, so my current plans are for a pine box and green embalming followed by being deposited in my church cemetery. There are monks in my beloved home state that build very high quality pine boxes.
The taxpayers are on the hook for one grave marker, but we will be buying the traditional headstone soon enough.
I'll try to come up with something pithy for the inscription before the time comes.

My church very wisely provides plots in lots of 4, and the running joke is that there will be room for the replacement spouse....or two.

 

I like..."See, I told you I was sick".

 

... 9/11, all those people jumping from the Twin Towers? They didn't die hitting the ground.

Your brain's primary behavioral function: protection. When death becomes imminent, it commences a proprietary shutdown procedure. When something traumatic happens, your brain's done the calculus, it knows it's mathematically certain death is imminent? But, benevolent deity, some freak circumstance happened, and you don't?

That happened to me.

Slapped repeatedly across the face, I was revived by a Porsche engineer, who'd seen this happen to test drivers several occasions before. That old German guy had a term he used for it. He said something in German which was translated to me as, that I was freight-blinded.

I guess perhaps it's like being in shock, and afflicted .temporal amnesia. But, no recollection whatsoever to this day of my certain death experience, my brain took its eraser, wiped every single trace of that incident. It wiped nothing else.

Funny thing about it, now I see certain things I'm not supposed to see. Since, my memory's razor sharp. I remember every telephone number and previous address, back to my kindergarten - asj.

 

deleted

 

Just editorial, should that read "fright-blinded"?

 

not if it was the train coming at you that did it

 

This is an important bit. I'm delighted to hear it.

 

This is really interesting. It's one of those things we know so little about.

Perhaps it wasn't up when you first posted. I think this is it.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.25147

Terminal spreading depolarization and electrical silence in death of human cerebral cortex - PubMed

 

I'd like to go the Taiwanese route.

You're folded into an oil drum and put on the back of a pick-up truck. The pickup truck has huge loudspeakers and plays disco music. It drives around the city playing the music, while dancers of your chosen gender in skimpy swimwear dance around your body.

The one change I'd make to that is that, instead of the oil drum, I'd like a Ghanaian coffin, possibly in the style of a pie. Ghanaian coffins - in pictures | World news | The Guardian

 

Burial at sea is a very solemn and moving ceremony, done that many times. Often done off of a destroyer hunting some of your friends later in the day.

My wife asked for her burial to be next to her father so grave site bought, headstone up, name and birth date carved. Just waiting for the final date. Kinda weird to see your own gravestone.

 

"Fright blinded" sort of describes my experience with temporary amnesia at least a couple times under very high stress, but thought it was related to disruption of the brain processes that move memories into short term storage, then to medium term, finally to long term. But since this didn't include a catatonic immobility during that period, it may be unrelated to what that German engineer was referring to.

The worst of my amnesias came with the news of the untimely death of my first father, when I was in elementary school. While my siblings have quite vivid memories of that day, including all of us kids sleeping (or trying to) with mom in her bed that night, my memory was completely blanked out. I do remember the instant it finally snapped back on, at the very first street crossing on the walk home from school, the following week. I've been told that I informed the class of this loss as part of daily 'show and tell', but that happened before the long term memory processing step resumed functioning. At least four days were not recorded.

A much shorter example happened in junior high school PE, where we were forced to do a pole vault with grossly insufficient instruction, and I was terrified of injury. I remember holding the pole horizontally at the start line, then holding it vertically while standing on top of the landing cushion, with no idea of what happened in between. This amnesia lasted just seconds, and I was immediately aware that those seconds were not recorded. The instructor was saying something to me as I walked back to the bench, but the brain's language processor had not resumed functioning, so I was having no clue what was said.

 

base jumpers
sky divers
car/train/plane/motorcycle crashes
partial drownings
cavers
etc

i remember several cases that could have resulted in "off button" happening, but the result was very vivid memory, instead of blank spots.