THE MOMENTS OF DEATH

Scientists continue to probe on what happens to a person at the time of death. They have tracked down the chemical components that are released on death which may explain how people perceive and feel death.

Inside the center of one's brain is a vestigial gland. It was thought to have little function. The pineal gland,  roughly the size of a grain of rice, is more heavily protected than even the heart with its literal cage of protection, because if something happens to your heart you die, but if something happens to your pineal, some say you can’t go to heaven.

The pineal gland  influences on both melatonin and pinoline, its end of life role in the creation of dimethyltriptamine  or DMT. This chemical, DMT, may well be the reason we, as a species, are capable of sentience itself.

DMT is a narcotic substance. It is a powerful psychedelic. The pineal gland produces this substance every day.

DMT is also the trigger that elicits dreams. So the reason one has dreams is that the brain is producing a narcotic.

However, at the time of death, the gland floods the brain with massive amounts of DMT.

Science has studied the effects of DMT on normal people. These drug users experience two major themes while under the influence:

1) A stretching of time – they experience the hectic 6 or 7 minutes as a near eternity or lifetime.

2) They experience religious incarnations with a tilt toward whatever sect the subject is affiliated with.

This compound has been known for a long time. Cultures have known about the pineal, more widely known as the inner eye, all-seeing eye, or the like – considered the body’s gateway to the soul.

Egypt had its "Eye of Horus"  Hindu culture has its bottu (the familiar forehead dot). Even the ancient art of yoga recognizes the brow chakra, or ajna, as blossoming at the pineal, or third eye.

Since science is aware that DMT is released at death, they have also observed that there is a mysterious several minutes of time after death where the brain still functions. These last  few minutes after death, subjectively, are experienced as an eternity, engrossed in the DMT universe. Also, the trip itself is a highly personal experience dictated by the deepest realms of the subconscious.

The scientific chemical basis of death helps explain LOST.

Each person was experiencing a traumatic event (the plane breaking a part mid-flight). They were charged with adrenaline, anxiety and fear. Their minds would have "flashbacks" on their lives, their experiences, their families and their regrets. "Your life flashes before your eyes" is a common recall from near death experiences. But at the moment of death, the people on board Flight 815 did "survive" for several minutes through the massive release of DMT into their brain. A wash with an intense psychedelic narcotic drug which induces a dream state. A dream state that would seem to last for an eternity because there is no "time" barrier in the subconscious. One could feel or experience days, months, years of livid events in the minutes after death.

Those passengers whose final thoughts were centered on the will to survive the crash did so in their last dream state upon death. 

So we did not view one coherent interaction between the survivors and the island, but hundreds of layers of final dreams stitched together like an overlapping quilt.

THE MIND'S EYE

Another fan theory to try to explain LOST. It deals with the idea that the viewers did not see what was really going on.

Fan Theory: It is all a hallucination.
The island isn't exactly ''real.'' All characters are aspects of one person (usually attributed to Jack or potentially supernatural characters like Hurley and Walt); or everyone is still on the plane trying to survive massive turbulence by escaping into a mass delusion.

Many people thought that the main characters were part of some collective unconscious state, from being all mental patients, to being coma patients hooked up to a central processing center, to being avatars in the world of cyberspace (like Ghost in the Shell). Hallucinations would neatly explain many things, like Walt's comic book polar bear and appearances by Jack's dad and Kate's horse. Hurley's imaginary friend "Dave" also puts into play the mental health issues relative to hallucinations, whether normal or drug induced. Also, conspicuous lit references like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge suggest that not everything is what it seems on the island.

In order for a hallucination theory to work, the subject(s) need to be confined in some limited space in order to be monitored and then fed the drugs to continue to cause the behavior. There was once an episode in Max Headroom which is an analogy to this premise; a company used a drug cocktail to put people into REM sleep in order to record, then re-sell the people's dreams as entertainment. The profit motivation to keep the characters in a fried brain state makes sense since it would be a cruel but realistic endeavor by corrupt scientists. One of the academic great quests is trying to understand the human mind, how it works, and better, how to manipulate it.

Keeping hundreds of characters confined in one mental stage would be like trying to herd cats. Since every person's mind has its own unique memories, dreams and escape fantasies, it would hard to imagine a reasonable situation where someone could keep those hundred subjects narrowly focused on a single setting: the island.

This theory may have merit, but it would really be a disappointing conclusion to the show. As some would remark, this would put LOST plot twist resolution on par with Dallas' horrible "it was all a dream" reboot.

A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION

The BBC published an article this month on a topic discussed in past LOST blogs . . . the mental aspects of severe isolation on human beings.

We’ve known for a while that isolation is physically bad. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response – a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This may have been appropriate in our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for us the outcome is mostly harmful.

Yet some of the most profound effects of loneliness are on the mind. For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time. One of the strangest effects is the ‘time-shifting’ reported by those who have spent long periods living underground without seeing daylight.  In 1961, French geologist Michel Siffre led a two-week expedition to study an underground glacier beneath the French Alps and ended up staying two months, fascinated by how the darkness affected human biology. He decided to abandon his watch and “live like an animal”.

While conducting tests with his team on the surface, they discovered it took him five minutes to count to what he thought was 120 seconds. 

A similar pattern of ‘slowing time’ was reported by Maurizio Montalbini, a sociologist and caving enthusiast. In 1993, Montalbini spent 366 days in an underground cavern near Pesaro in Italy that had been designed with Nasa to simulate space missions, breaking his own world record for time spent underground. When he emerged, he was convinced only 219 days had passed. His sleep-wake cycles had almost doubled in length. Since then, researchers have found that in darkness most people eventually adjust to a 48-hour cycle: 36 hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep. The reasons are still unclear.

As well as their time-shifts, Siffre and Montalbini reported periods of mental instability too. But these experiences were nothing compared with the extreme reactions seen in notorious sensory deprivation experiments in the mid-20th Century.

In the 1950s and 1960s, China was rumored to be using solitary confinement to “brainwash” American prisoners captured during the Korean War, and the US and Canadian governments were all too keen to try it out. Their defense departments funded a series of research programs that might be considered ethically dubious today.

The most extensive took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal. The McGill researchers invited paid volunteers – mainly college students – to spend days or weeks by themselves in sound-proof cubicles, deprived of meaningful human contact. Their aim was to reduce perceptual stimulation to a minimum, to see how their subjects would behave when almost nothing was happening. They minimized what they could feel, see, hear and touch, fitting them with translucent visors, cotton gloves and cardboard cuffs extending beyond the fingertips. As reported in Scientific American magazine,   they had them lie on U-shaped foam pillows to restrict noise, and set up a continuous hum of air-conditioning units to mask small sounds.

After only a few hours, the students became acutely restless. They started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests.

But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations. They would start with points of light, lines or shapes, eventually evolving into bizarre scenes, such as squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders or processions of eyeglasses filing down a street. They had no control over what they saw: one man saw only dogs; another, babies.

Some of them experienced sound hallucinations as well: a music box or a choir, for instance. Others imagined sensations of touch: one man had the sense he had been hit in the arm by pellets fired from guns. Another, reaching out to touch a doorknob, felt an electric shock.

When they emerged from the experiment they found it hard to shake this altered sense of reality, convinced that the whole room was in motion, or that objects were constantly changing shape and size.

The researchers had hoped to observe their subjects over several weeks, but the trial was cut short because they became too distressed to carry on. Few lasted beyond two days, and none as long as a week. Afterwards, Hebb wrote in the journal American Psychologist that the results were “very unsettling to us… It is one thing to hear that the Chinese are brainwashing their prisoners on the other side of the world; it is another to find, in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base.”

In 2008, clinical psychology experiment  isolating six volunteers for 48 hours in sound-proofed rooms in a former nuclear bunker. The results were similar. The volunteers suffered anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia and significant deterioration in their mental functioning. They also hallucinated: a heap of 5,000 empty oyster shells; a snake; zebras; tiny cars; the room taking off; mosquitoes; fighter planes buzzing around.

Why does the perceptually deprived brain play such tricks? Cognitive psychologists believe that the part of the brain that deals with ongoing tasks, such as sensory perception, is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of information, such as visual, auditory and other environmental cues. But when there is a dearth of information, says Robbins, “the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain’s central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn’t make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern.” It creates whole images out of partial ones. In other words, it tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

How do these concepts of isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, emotional and mental deterioration apply to LOST? All of the LOST characters shared a mutual feeling of isolation during their lives. If one takes that element and then have those people put into a forced isolation (such as a mental institution or solitary confinement in prison), the human mind will "try" to construct reality from the limited information around the subject, but ends up with hallucinations and a fantasy world that the subject believes is real.

The island can be viewed as an isolation tank; a fantasy world fueled by the hallucinations of one or all of the characters.

ISLAND VISIONS

Boone had a vivid, "real" vision of his sister Shannon being killed by the smoke monster. It was so real that Boone blamed Locke by attacking him with a knife. Locke explained that he drugged Boone in order for him to have his vision, so he could understand the island better.

Locke was apparently one of the first survivors to make a "connection" with the island. But he was not alone in the island creating visions.

The series is littered with hallucination episodes.

In Season 1:
Jack repeatedly sees his dead father, Christian, in the jungle.
Claire has a dream about looking for her lost baby, encountering Locke, and finding the crib filled with blood.
Boone has an illicit dream with Shannon, later to find her killed by the smoke monster.
Locke dreams of a Nigerian drug plane crash on the island. He also becomes wheelchair bound again. He also sees a blood covered Boone blankly repeating "Theresa goes up the stairs, Theresa goes down the stairs."

In Season 2:
Shannon has three visions of Walt: a) while searching for Vincent, she sees Walt speak in gibberish to her (backwards: "Don't push the button. Button bad."), b) in her tent, Walt speaks backwards again "They're coming, and they're close," and c) while searching for Walt with Sayid, both glimpse a vision of Walt in the jungle.
Hurley dreams of gorging on food, speaking Korean to Jin and sees the mascot for Mr. Cluck's.
Kate and Sawyer sees Kate's horse in the jungle.
Mr. Eko sees flashes of his life when the smoke monster confronts him.
Charlie has two dreams about needing to save Claire's child, which include images from his childhood and a painting by Verrocchio.
Hurley has visions and conversations with his imaginary friend, Dave.
Mr. Eko has a dream featuring Anna Lucia and Yemi in which they tell him to help Locke, and instructions from Yemi to look for a question mark.
Locke has a dream from Eko's point of view, where he climbs a cliff and meets Yemi.

In Season 3:
Locke goes on a "vision quest" in which is is guided by Boone and instructed to save
Eko.
Desmond has a series of mental flashes in which he sees future events: a) Locke giving a speech about going after kidnapped Jack, Kate and Sawyer; b) Lightning striking Claire's hut, killing Charlie; c) Charlie drowning trying to save Claire; d) Charlie dying in the ocean while trying to catch a seagull for Claire; e) Charlie is killed by an arrow trap on a mission to find a parachutist; and f) Charlie drowning while flipping a switch in a hatch; Claire and Aaron then leaving the island in a helicopter.
Mr. Eko has a confrontation conversation with Yemi.
Young Ben sees his dead mother on the island.
Locke, after being shot by Ben in the purge mass grave, has a vision of grown Walt telling him to get up because he has "work to do."

In Season 4:
Hurley has several visions of Charlie: a) in a convenience store; b) in the LAPD interrogation room; and c) outdoors at the mental institution (where Charlie physically slaps him into conversation).
Hurley sees Jacob's cabin on the island, which follows him until he wills it to disappear.
Michael has two visions of Libby, once in the hospital and once before he tries to set off the bomb on the freighter.
Jack sees a vision of his father in the hospital lobby after hearing a smoke detector go off.
Claire talks to her dead father, Christian, on the island. Christian can pick up Aaron.
Locke dreams of Horace building a cabin for his wife. Horace tells Locke to find Jacob he must find Horace who has been dead for 12 years. (In this vision, the image of Horace skips and repeats like a broken record for a short time.)
Kate has a dream that Claire tells her she cannot take Aaron back to the island.
On the freighter, Michael sees Christian who tells him that "he can go now."

In Season 5:
Hurley has a vision of Ana Lucia, who stops him to tell him he has "work to do."
Locke is told by Walt that Walt had a dream about Locke on the island, in a suit, surrounded by people who wanted to kill him.

In Season 6:
Hurley sees dead Jacob, who instructs him to go to the Temple and the Lighthouse.
Sawyer and Flocke see a vision of young Jacob in the jungle. Flocke is surprised that Sawyer can see him.
Alpert sees his dead wife Isabella in the the Black Rock.
Isabella appears before both Hurley and Alpert on the island near where Alpert buried her locket.
Hurley sees dead Michael twice, first to warns him not to blow up the Ajira plane and second, to tell him to destroy the Black Rock. (In this encounter, Michael claims he is a whisper, a trapped soul on the island.)

Many of these visions or dreams involve interaction with dead characters. The acceptance of speaking directly to dead people freaks out only Hurley (momentarily).

What do many of these occurrences have in common? The smoke monster. The monster could shape shift and create human forms. It admitted that it was Christian on the island. As a result, it could be argued that the hallucinations and visions character had during the series were projections created by the smoke monster. The motivation of these visions is clear: to manipulate, confuse and create anxiety in the characters. It is like a person dangling a feather above house cats; a form of play. Many characters used their visions to guide them in their decision making process, usually with bad results.

There have been theories that the series was just a series of character dreams, individual or collective. But it is also possible that the dreams were actual programs or commands imputed by the smoke monster(s) to move the human characters around their game board (the island). Supernatural beings playing a supernatural game of backgammon.

This supernatural trick and manipulation also follows in the ancient Egyptian burial rites where the king must take a dangerous journey through the underworld. He may be tricked by the underworld gods, go through trials, and be judged by the decisions he makes during the course of finding a way to paradise. The Book of the Dead was a manual on how to traverse the underworld. It allowed the king to bring with him his servants, consorts, food, weapons, and magic spells to help in his journey. The underworld gods also had a childlike cruelty in their game play with lost souls.

Locke's "connection" with the island may have seemed real to him, but it was clearly a manipulation by higher forces. Locke believed in the island, but the island used him like a pawn.

But this raises an interesting question: if these "waking" visions of dead people were the smoke monster, could it also have controlled the characters dreams while they were asleep? Anything is possible, and based on the number of incidents, it is probable. Since Christian's body was not in the coffin, Smokey had to create his image from Jack's memories. In fact, the entire island may have been built upon the memories of those unfortunate souls who were shipwrecked on the island. Crazy Mother was a smoke monster when she destroyed the Roman village. Flocke turned into the smoke monster and attacked the temple. The smoke monster was not just a security system, but the entire island system. It created everything from the memories of human beings, including their feelings, emotional strings, their fears, their experiences and their goals. It "replays" those events to see how human beings react or change. It is not a moral, religious or redemptive series of tests. No, perhaps the smoke monster(s) are using human beings the same way our scientists use lab rats to run through mazes and tests. The whole series was data acquisition by the smoke monsters to understand the human condition.

But, then again, the ending seems to fall outside the realm of island experimentation. Unless, one believes that the smoke monster master(s) became "attached" to their pets in such a fashion to use their collective memories to give them a final illusion of happiness upon their mortal demise.