It might seem like a Hollywood creation, but the concept of dying people seeing their lives life flashing before their eyes could be based on reality.
Scientists interviewed more than 260 people who had faced "near death experiences" and found that several of them had witnessed multiple events from different stages of their lives, although not necessarily in chronological order.
"Often, the mind played tricks," says the Daily Telegraph.
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Participants said they saw numerous memories at the same time and some reported seeing their memories from the point of view of other people involved.
A common theme was that the individual lost all sense of time when viewing the events. One survivor wrote: "There is not a linear progression, there is lack of time limits... It was like being there for centuries. I was not in time/space."
Another commonly reported experience involved feeling the pain of others. One participant described being able to see their father's childhood and previously undisclosed pain, while another said they could sense pain and sadness from the people in the room with them when they were close to death.
The researchers, from Hadassah University in Jerusalem, suggested that such "life-review experiences" (LRE) occur because parts of the brain that store autobiographical memories - including the prefrontal, medial temporal and parietal cortices - are among the last to shut down when the body experiences significant blood or oxygen loss.
Their study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, concludes: "Re-experiencing one's own life-events, so-called LRE, is a phenomenon with well-defined characteristics, and its sub-components may be also evident in healthy people.
"This suggests that a representation of life-events as a continuum exists in the cognitive system, and may be further expressed in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress".
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