by Lyall Watson
If the rats were removed from the water just before they died, they recovered very quickly and having learned in this way that the situation was not hopeless, swam for much longer when next returned to the jar. One such conditioned rat lasted for eighty-one hours and presumably would have continued swimming until it died of starvation. It seems that humans under hexing or voodoo sentences of death behave in just the same way. They die of hopelessness, but if any man survives the test he never again becomes a victim of enchantment. He has been inoculated against this kind of death.
Occasionally, patients under treatment express the conviction that they will soon die. When they do, it is usually assumed that they have allowed themselves to die by giving up in the same way that objects of witchcraft submit to lethal helplessness, but there is another possibility. One psychiatrist who examined cases of this kind found among them a preponderance of heart and kidney disorders. [17] He suggests that chronic disorders of these organs involve sudden changes in physiological equilibrium which would quickly make themselves known to the patient. It makes sense to assume that the person would be the first to know when disintegration produces a marked change in his own internal weather. If the change is severe, he is well aware of this and becomes pregnant with death, delivering right on schedule.
There are many anecdotal accounts of animals that seem to possess the same intuition and creep away somewhere to die. The elephant's graveyard is pure myth, but the stages of dying follow each other in such faithful sequence that it is not unreasonable to regard them as classic appetitive behaviors leading to the final consummatory act of goth. The fact that we never seem to get the chance to practice these behavior patterns, that dying is something that happens only once to each individual, has led several scientists (most notably Freud) to develop the concept of a "death instinct." There is certainly ample evidence in man of strong tendencies toward self-destruction, but there is little to show that the source of these destructive forces is instinctive. I believe that the apparent headlong plunge toward death in certain circumstances is proof rather of an instinct for the patterns of dying. We become familiar with dying even before we are born, and we live constantly in its company. The surprise is not that we should become conscious of it in certain circumstances, but that it does not play an even more active part in our awareness of ourselves and of the things around us. There is ample opportunity in many aspects of our daily lives for us to practice death and dying.
It is possible that our first direct deathlike experience is being born. Few people ever again make a journey so fraught with danger as that terrible trip down the four inches of birth canal that leads to the open air. We will probably never know exactly what goes on in a baby's mind at this time, but the chances are that it experiences something like the stages of dying. When labor begins and the uterus makes its first terrifying attempts to eject the child from the warmth and security of the womb, the reaction of the fetus must be to resist. In Scotland recently an attempt was made to induce labor by rupturing the amniotic membranes of a woman who was seriously overdue. A pint of uterine liquid was removed with a catheter and the maternity team was gathered around waiting for the action to begin, when the fetus produced three loud cries of wrath from inside. A perfectly normal baby boy was finally delivered nineteen hours later. [252]
Early resistance and denial of birth must eventually give way to an acceptance of the relentless pressures of the uterus. It would help the birth process a great deal if the child could relax in a state of co-operative detachment. It seems that we really are aware of what is happening to us at this time and can even remember details of it many years later. Under hypnotic regression, which involves taking subjects step by step back through their lives, many have been able to recall details such as being born head first or feet first, of having the head gripped by forceps, or of being almost strangled by the umbilical cord. [146] There are always other possible interpretations of "memories" of this kind, but in some instances the facts are ones that are unknown even to the subject's mothers, but could be checked against clinical records.
Birth and death have the fact of separation in common. At birth a baby is for the first time wrenched away from its mother, and as it grows, further separations of longer and longer duration occur. These may give the child the chance to master the contrasting states of togetherness and isolation, of being and nonbeing. Adah Maurer says, "By the time he is three months old, the healthy baby is secure enough in his self feelings to be ready to experiment with these contrasting states. In the game of peek-a-boo, he replays in safe circumstances the alternate terror and delight, confirming his sense of self by risking and regaining consciousness." [179] In a sense, he is alternating between life and death.
Later, the child plays more active life-and-death games in which the reality of death is tested under a variety of circumstances by acting out killing and dying and being dead. Play is rightly coming to be considered as one of the most serious forms of behavior, one in which formidable ideas, which would normally be highly traumatic, can be tolerated and even enjoyed while they are being tested. Many animals play in a way that enables them also to practice skills that will be important to them later in life. Some even play dead.
The American opossum Didelphis virginiana has given its name to the behavior that it produces when attacked. [80] "Playing possum" involves collapsing with the eyes open, lying on the side with the legs extended and claws grasping the ground. In this condition the animal is wide awake and shows no change in body temperature, oxygen consumption, or blood chemistry. Records of its brain waves are identical to those of a normal highly alert individual. A group in Los Angeles explored the response in detail by implanting electrodes in the brains of a number of opossums and getting them to feign death by shaking them with an artificial dog jaw while playing recorded barks and growls through a loudspeaker. [207] Electroencephalographic records show that the animal is highly alert to everything that happens and is actually "pretending" to be dead, On the other side of the Atlantic, hunters report that a fox "when feigning death, will often cautiously open its eyes, raise its head, look around, and finally scamper off, if its pursuers have withdrawn to a safe distance." [43]
Very often the animals produce postures that are far more deathlike than real death. Charles Darwin pointed this out by collecting seventeen different species of death-feigning insects and comparing their simulated death position with the postures adopted by insects of the same species that bad died naturally or been killed slowly with camphor. He found that "in no instance was the attitude exactly the same, and in several instances the attitudes of the feigners and of the really dead were as unlike as they could possibly be." [58] This makes it seem that these species are not so much imitating death, which very often looks rather lifelike, but are acting out some other animal's idea of how their death should look. The response is obviously audience-oriented, and in the course of evolution it is the predators who have determined the death-feigning posture by coming along like drama critics and picking out and eating all the bad actors.
Crustaceans, spiders, and insects that feign death do so at the appropriate moment, but unlike the opossum they lose control of their muscles and adopt a totally rigid state known as tonic immobility. The same condition has been induced and described in birds, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, sheep, chimpanzees, and men. The simplest way to put a man into this state is to get him to bend forward from the waist through an angle of ninety degrees, tell him to hold his breath, and then use two assistants to throw him suddenly over onto his back. The muscles contract violently and the subject becomes rigid and immobile, sometimes for as long as a minute. The phenomenon is often seen on football fields when players are suddenly thrown and seem to be seriously injured, until they just as suddenly recover and return to full mobility. There are reports of catatonic conditions among soldiers involved in hand-to-hand combat where death-feigning, either deliberate or reflexive, could certainly have high survival value.
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bsp; Many biologists have questioned the value of just lying down helpless in front of an enemy, but the fact that the behavior of death-feigning exists at all suggests that it must work often enough to be worth trying. There are obviously certain circumstances in which it works best, and there has to be some sort of limiting factor which controls the automatic response so that it does not get triggered too often or by inappropriate stimuli. The threshold level seems to be quite high, ensuring that this immobility is used only as a last resort in the most desperate situations. Hudson Hoagland, in his studies on the lizards Anolis carolinensis and Phrynosoma cornutum has discovered a most effective built-in control. If one of these animals uses the response too often, imitation death turns into the real thing, and it actually dies. [120]
One of the few reports on what it feels like to be thrown into the state of unintentional death.feigning also provides proof of its effectiveness against attack. The explorer David Livingstone was once attacked by a lion which threw him onto his back, grabbed him by the shoulder, and began to maul him. He felt a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror," and when he continued to lie immobile, the lion put him down for a moment and he recovered and made good his escape. [168] Livingstone's detached state of mind sounds identical to that remoteness experienced by the Alpine fallers and shows yet again that under certain conditions the body is capable of drawing for emergency purposes on parts of the sequence of dying. It also demonstrates that these patterns of behavior can actually have survival value and not only accompany dying but promote living.
Another common human reaction to stress situations is to faint. Emotional stress produces an overstimulation of the vagus nerve and this slows the heart and at the same time relaxes blood vessels in the abdomen so that you get that "sinking feeling" as blood gravitates to the gut. This results in a sudden lowering of blood pressure in the arteries of the brain and you become unconscious, but as soon as you fall over, your head comes down to the level of your stomach and the flow of blood to the brain is restored. A faint is a reflex, but also Obviously one with built-in controls, because it produces precisely the conditions necessary for recovery.
Fainting spells were once very fashionable among women of a certain class as a means of dealing with or modifying troublesome interpersonal situations. No doubt some of them found that they could achieve the desired results by merely faking a faint, by feinting, but many of them did actually lose consciousness Some did so with so much conviction that it was often assumed that they had died. This is an excellent example of a response that is socially conditioned, but that becomes a physiological reality for those able to bring bodily responses under mental control. Fainting is no longer so popular and it occurs less often, but one can see the evolutionary possibilities in this situation. If the social pressures in favor of fainting had persisted for long enough, it could have become a normal and invariable part of our instinctive behavioral repertoire. Fainting still occurs in certain situations, but as Livingstone discovered, there is a higher survival value attached to the kind of death-feigning that allows one to retain consciousness and take advantage of changes in the situation.
The deathlike postures of insects seem to be reflexes of the fainting type that place the individual entirely at the mercy of a predator. The opossum or fox that feigns death is using the more advanced technique with all its advantages of flexibility, but the evidence suggests that this state of conscious immobility is initiated by a reflex no less rigid and automatic than that which turns a wood louse on its back. To be effective against attack, the response has to be rapid, and there is no action in the body that takes place more quickly than a reflex, which short-circuits the normal paths of neural control and bypasses the brain entirely. The reflex and the behavior it leads to appear to be inborn and not conditioned, because they appear as fully developed patterns at the age of about four months, even in isolated opossums. The pattern does, however, remain under some sort of conscious control, because the moment the threat disappears, the opossum comes back to life and continues on its way.
Allied to fainting are two other states of collapse that one hears very little about these days. One is cataplexy, in which the subject sinks limply to the ground with the eyes closed, completely unable to move or to utter a sound, but remains conscious and fully aware of all that is happening. This is the human equivalent of the state that can easily be induced in birds or animals such as rabbits by holding them tightly or suddenly turning them over on their backs. It is described in older medical texts as "being precipitated by strong emotion and persisting until such emotion be controlled," but it seems to be a thing of the past, as it fails to appear at all in most modern medical dictionaries. Perhaps today we simply bury our cataplectics alive. It could be significant that one of the earliest discussions of this problem occurs in a paper "On the Signs That Distinguish Real from Apparent Death" that was published in the Transylvania Journal of Medicine in 1835. [247] The author was prompted to explore the subject by the number of vampire scares to which his part of the world is subject. He and others have suggested that the destruction in tombs, the broken coffins, torn shrouds, and twisted bloody corpses were not so much evidence of vampirism as of the last desperate struggles of cataplectics to free themselves from their premature graves. [177]
The second rare condition is catalepsy, which is described as "a sudden suspension of sensibility and voluntary movement associated with a waxy rigidity of the limbs." This still occurs today among catatonic schizophrenics, but it can also be induced in almost anyone by hypnosis. One of the favorite tricks of the "mad monk" Rasputin was to arrange an avenue of living statues in bizarre postures to amuse the neurotic Imperial Court of old St. Petersburg. The same thing is still being done today by irresponsible stage hypnotists. Spontaneous waxlike conditions also occur as a result of sustained rhythmic stimuli. For many years it was believed that catalepsy produced by witch doctors and voodoo medicine men was caused only by tetany, a rigidity of the muscles brought on by breathing too hard and lowering the acidity of the blood. Stephen Black has recently made a study of the activities of the Yoruba witch doctors in Nigeria and found that they produce a perfect cataleptic state in response to the rhythmic stimuli of drumming and chanting. [20] Once the subjects have been hypnotized in this way, their bodies can be moved into, and will hold, any attitude almost indefinitely as part of a sacrificial ritual.
In mammals it is possible that this pliability is a conditioned reflex that was established before birth, when the fetus needed to be molded without resistance to take up the shape of the womb no matter how strange this might be. At that time the rhythmic stimuli will have been provided by the steady beating of the mother's heart. Even after birth, one of the most effective ways to soothe and lull a crying baby to sleep is for the mother to hold it up to her breast where it can hear the familiar rhythm. The number of cataleptic young girls that have to be carried out of concert halls on stretchers bears witness to the fact that pop groups have discovered that pulsebeat rhythms are the ones that work best, even fifteen. years later.
The normal pulse rate is about seventy beats per minute, but there are some faster rhythms whose effects are just as dramatic. In 1946 Grey Walter discovered that flashing a light at regular intervals into a subject's eyes would produce strange effects on the brain rhythms and that certain frequencies of flicker, between six and ten times the rate of the pulse, would induce sudden seizures that looked like epileptic fits. [289] This response has now become a valuable clinical aid for diagnosing potential epileptics, but it has also been discovered that most otherwise normal people can be provoked into seizures in the same way. If a feedback circuit is introduced, so that the flashing light is actually fired by the brain signals themselves, this synchronized flicker, can produce immediate epileptic fits and resulting unconsciousness in more than half the world's population.
Epilepsy is a symptom, not a disease. It has been shrouded in superstition ever since it fir
st appeared and was assumed to be produced by possession. It has been attributed to St. Paul, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and (with more justice perhaps) to Dostoevski, but the fact is that anyone can have an epileptic fit. It is simply a period of disorganized activity in the brain and can be brought on by a head injury, electric shocks, drugs, asphyxia, or even a severe bout of fever. These fits, which involve muscle spasms and convulsions and lead to unconsciousness, are not merely like epilepsy; they are epilepsy. The only difference between an epileptic and anyone else is that the epileptic is likely to have this kind of disturbance more often. Sometimes the cause of an attack can be traced to a blood clot or a tumor, but the fits in recurrent epilepsy seem to be spontaneous. They can be repressed by sedative drugs which make the patient drowsy, but these leave the suspicion that perhaps all the treatment is doing is lowering the over-all activity of the brain. There is no evidence that the grand mal or most severe fits are in any way hereditary, so the possibility exists that they might, like the detachment stage in dying, be psychosomatic reactions produced in response to certain threatening conditions. This suggestion takes epilepsy out of the area of brain damage and neural disorder and makes it a behavior pattern that can be produced in any normal brain and might in certain situations have survival value. There are strong resemblances between the phenomena of epilepsy and those of dying; and I suggest that both have much in common with the most familiar of all deathlike states -- the trance.