Abstract
The compressed life review (CLR) is a mnemonic illusion of having “your entire life flashing before your eyes”. This research was guided by concerns over the retrospective methodology used in CLR studies. To depart from this methodology, I considered the long-term working memory (WM), “concentric”, and “activation-based” models of memory. A novel theoretically rooted laboratory-based experimental technique aimed to elicit the CLR-like experience with no risk to healthy participants was developed. It consists of listening to superimposed audio recordings of previously trained verbal cues to an individually composed set of self-defining memories (SDMs). The technique evoked a self-reported CLR-like experience in 10 out of 20 participants. A significant similarity in eye movement patterns between a single SDM condition and a choir of SDM conditions in self-reported CLR experiencers was confirmed. In both conditions, stimuli caused relative visual immobilization, in contrast to listening to a single neutral phrase, and a choir of neutral phrases that led to active visual exploration. The data suggest that CLR-like phenomenology may be successfully induced by triggering short-term access to the verbally cued SDMs and may be associated with specific patterns of visual activity that are not reportedly involved with deliberate autobiographical retrieval.
Highlights
The compressed life review (CLR), known as panoramic memories, total recall, replay of past experiences, or the life-review experience, is an intriguing mental phenomenon implying the extreme, yet instantaneous, manifestation of autobiographical memory (AM)
The eye-tracking detected high eye motility in response to the neutral phrase, which, according to self-reports, caused a relevant mental picture. These findings reveal that the awareness of the previously trained self-defining autobiographical episode did not evoke the active visual exploration that is typically associated with retrieval of an AM
At the outset of the present study, I recognized that the CLR experience could not be explored satisfactorily on the basis of the common, exclusively retrospective self-reporting methodology
Summary
The compressed life review (CLR), known as panoramic memories, total recall, replay of past experiences, or the life-review experience, is an intriguing mental phenomenon implying the extreme, yet instantaneous, manifestation of autobiographical memory (AM). As survivors are the main source of information on CLRs, this hints that the phenomenon might be of a high adaptive value in helping to perform rescue actions [1,2]. One of the earliest examples was from Albert Heim, a Swiss geologist, who recollected his experience during a fall of 70 ft from a cliff face in the Alps. I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance . . . ” [3]
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