They don’t happen. And if they do happen, no one has ever told you about a real one. Studying how memory works has been a really interesting. Do we know exactly how memory works? Hell no… much of it is a mystery. However, there is a lot we do know. There are certain areas of the brain that are involved in certain types of memory storage and memory function. We can record the action of memory activation. If this activation does not occur, no memory is recalled.
When someone is recounting an experience they had where Jesus sent them to hell to see what it was like, to warn those of us still living, or someone “dies” and goes to heaven, they tell you that they have left their body. If this is the case, which it is not, their brains would not have ever encoded and stored any memory of this experience, and would have no idea at all that it ever happened once returned to their body. As nice as it would be to believe in things like people dying and getting raised from the dead, I cannot.
My professor brought in a detective to talk to us about how they use cognitive interviewing in their work, which is centered around the human process of memory recall. On a side note, he mentioned that when they arrive at a crime scene, and they do an initial 1 on 1 interview with multiple witnesses, and they all have a very similar story, that these people have without a doubt collaborated and came up with what to say before the cops arrived… they’re lying. No real witness account is ever the same as another. That’s how memory works. Our memories aren’t little movie reels where we store every second, every frame, or a “whole picture”. Memory is the triggering of a familiar stimulus, which evokes a node or clump of similar or related images. Memory is much more arbitrary than linear. And what do people always say about out of body experiences? They are all so similar that they MUST be true, and that they remember the entire thing so vividly that it must be true. Both of these things, while you might think would show that these people actually had these things happen to them, actually show the exact opposite.
