Yesterday, I was rudely confronted on Twitter by a fellow going by the moniker @DConRadiolo who was insistent that he had proof of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). I have no problem believing that people near death have experiences, but I do find it improbable that they represent minds existing outside the body. But this guy was adamant that Life Reviews are “the holy grail of NDEs” and prove that there is something miraculous going on.
What is a Life Review? You’ve heard the phrase, “their life flashed before their eyes” — what the True Believers claims is that in some NDEs, the subject actually replays every last minute of their life, over the span of a few seconds, showing the effect of their every action on their life. Despite being nearly instantaneous, these people report that they saw the totality of their life flash by in minute detail.
This is complete nonsense, of course, doesn’t even make sense, and can’t be supported by any concrete evidence. What they really remember is not the details of their lives, but the perception of having reviewed every detail of their life.
He told me I had to watch this video of Kenneth Ring explaining how Life Reviews worked, as if that would convince me. I did. It didn’t.
As is typical, they confuse constructing memories with recalling memories. We don’t have a video recording in our heads of every moment of our lives — there is no magical Akashic Library where every experience of every person is stored. Memories are built on the fly, and aren’t really, in the truest sense, “memories”: we take the small fragments we do recall and assemble details around them that seem true.
For instance, I just picked a random date, 3 August 1982. Can I remember what I did that day? Do I have a recollection of what I had for breakfast, or what I did at work (was it even a workday?), or where I was? Nope. I can remember what I did hour by hour yesterday, but that day 33 years ago is completely gone.
But here’s what happened as I thought about that date. I know I existed then, so something must have happened…oh, yeah. We were living in Westmoreland student housing in Eugene then. I would have awakened next to a beautiful naked 24 year old woman…that’s certainly memorable!
Breakfast would have been…poached eggs on toast? Details of that flimsy tin egg poacher we used to own swim into my memory.
I would have gone out to the porch to my bike. Our neighbors on the second floor were Jimmy and Claire Demetriou, who were Cypriots with all kinds of interesting stories to tell; Jimmy and I shared an interest in computers. Downstairs was Anita…Smith, I think, with her kids. Our best friends, Lila and Jim Harper, lived just down the street.
I would have biked up Garfield, and turned right on 13th Avenue — it’s a straight shot to the university, past the fairgrounds, unlike the bike path which tended to meander along the Amazon creek.
I’d lock my bike to the rack down by the meteorite below Science I, and take the stairs up to the second floor. There’s the Kimmel lab, and now I can see the other labs popping into existence in my mind — the Grant and Postlethwaite labs next door, Weston down the hall, around the corner in the connected building next door is Streisinger’s…wait, no. <record scratching noise> 1982 — we would have already made the move to the Institute of Neuroscience, in Heustis Hall. Error! Brain scrambles to reconcile locations!
Right. That was after prelims. I would have been doing a lot of EM work, chasing the Mauthner to motoneuron synapse, and so I was in Science I because that’s where Eric Schabtach’s EM facility was located. And those other labs were still there in ’82, and Weston and Postlethwaite wouldn’t move over to IoN until some years later.
That makes the rest of the day easy to construct. Histochemistry: paraformaldehyde and glutaraldehyde and acrolein and osmium tetroxide, epon-araldyte and long days in front of the ultramicrotome, shearing off shimmering silver and gold squares and laying them out on copper grids. Why was the damned copper lattice always obscuring the ventral floor of the spinal cord?
Then, bicycle home. Dinner would have been…macaroni and cheese? Maybe toasted cheese sandwiches, made with that horrible petroleum flavored free government cheese. We were living on graduate student salaries, and we had to eat a heck of a lot of cheap food (also, this was the age before ramen was a thing, so that other cheap staple wasn’t available yet).
Notice what I’ve done? Really, I have absolutely no specific memories of that particular day, or of a great many other days. But I do have memories of places, and friends, and colleagues, and my daily routine, and because brains are really good at modeling the world, I can spontaneously assemble those fragments into a vivid (to me, at least) picture of my life in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 1982.
And it was vivid! As I started to try to recall that time, those people and places popped into my head, and they were strong: suddenly, I was remembering the flowers outside the county fairgrounds, Jimmy’s lovely accent, those rubbery molds for the epoxy EM blocks, the view of the creek from our kitchen window. We store these pieces in our memories, and they have potency to us, and as my brain built the narrative from those scraps, that imagined day became clearer and stronger to me. I almost convinced myself that those events actually happened.
But that little jarring screech in the middle was real: I was busily reconstructing the old Kimmel lab in my head, when I realized that couldn’t have been the case in 1982, and there was this strangely uncomfortable moment when my brain struggled to reconcile an anachronism. It was a good save, I think, but still, why did I care that my illusion was broken? Because when we build these memories in our heads they become real to us.
Now imagine, though, that some darned skeptic comes along and really breaks the narrative. They slam down credit card receipts that prove I bought gas in Florence, Oregon on 3 August 1982! It’s all a lie! What would my brain do?
Adjust and reconcile. My date was off, but those events still happened. Oh, right, Florence…and it would charge off and start scooping up old memories of the coast, of Strawberry Hill, of the Devil’s Churn, Sea Lion Caves, the marine station, and it would obligingly build a ‘memory’ of a summertime trip to the shore. And I’d be lost in a new reverie.
It wouldn’t be an actual recording of events. It would be an assortment of details (even confirmable details) confabulated into a narrative and a context. That’s how memory works!
My interrogator couldn’t possibly hope that I would explain all that over Twitter, but he seemed to think that asserting that we relive our entire lives in the moment of our death would somehow convince me to throw out everything we know about how memory works.
Somehow, there are large numbers of people who are absolutely certain that the appropriate analogy for memory is a VCR: that our eyes are like cameras and our brains are vast storehouses of data that has poured into them over the years. Surprise: our eyes do a fair bit of processing, and what gets passed back to the brain is a rendered version of a tiny field of vision, and what the brain does is throw away most of the information, extracting just the necessary skeleton of the view, and it then fits it into a mental model of the scene. And then almost every scrap of sensory information is not stored, but also discarded; we remember key details, nothing more, to flesh out that model.
When they try to tell me that their blithely counterfactual claims should be sufficient “proof” of their weird ideas, all I can do is laugh and shoo them away…and then, like @DConRadiolo, they start ranting angrily. I just wish these loons who are so obsessed with life after death would try to learn something about how their brains work.
Mind out of body is ridiculous as one could rightly question the concept of mind, other than as a hypothetical construct, to begin with.
Ah, the old here is “proof” for a soul argument. Here is real evidence that says otherwise. But then, evidence means nothing to TrueBelievers™, also known as delusional fools.
I remember people eating ramen to save money when I was in the dorm at the University of Washington in the mid 70s. I remember one particular person talking about it, but my sense is there were others. That particular person also sold her blood plasma. Of course, these are 40 year old memories, so they could be problematic. Both were surprising to me, although in different ways, which is probably why I remember them. I’m more certain about the former one.
And then, many years later, I married a Japanese woman from Hokkaido and learned that ramen isn’t only something you eat when you don’t have money for food.
There is a headline article on NBC right now about a ten-year-old kid who supposedly “remembers” a whole bunch of details about the life of a moderately famous and successful Hollywood agent, and this “proves” reincarnation. Apparently on the planet they inhabit, research is not a thing that can be done by anyone other than journalists, and ten-year-olds always tell the truth.
As PZ says, memory is not consistent. Recently my mother and I were discussing an incident which happened over forty years ago. While we agreed on the main part of the story (that’s the right word to use) we remembered certain details quite differently. For instance I remember one of my brothers was involved and my mother remembers it was my other brother. But both my mother and I remember the incident quite clearly.
The problem of course is that any evidence that truly metaphysical NDEs are impossible is considered evidence that they’re real. Oh, you just explained how real memories make a full flashing of life impossible? Well a full flashing of life happened, therefore it must have been a miracle. Checkmate, atheists! Of course, they cannot demonstrate to you that a full flashing of life before someone’s eyes actually happened, and even the person who supposedly had one can only tell you that they perceived it happening (and will be unable to give you any real demonstration of knowledge gained from the NDE, only the same kinds of fragmented memories you already explained they should have). Instead, you just have to take it on faith, as in all things religious. The elevation of faith as a virtue is the most insidious aspect of religion.
I just wish these loons who are so obsessed with life after death would try to learn something about how their brains work.
If learning fails, they should try tripping on nitrous oxide a couple times. Or general anaesthesia.
Oddly, goddies never experience anaesthesia and conclude they’ve seen heaven. What’s really nuts is often, they experience both at once. One of my neighbors had a horse-riding accident: horse tried to liberate equine kind by back-flipping onto him and gutted him with the saddle-horn – he stopped and restarted multiple times in surgery under fentanyl, the knife, and morpine, then a couple weeks after his managed coma — managed to confabulate that he’d seen god telling him to be nicer to horses. No fucking shit.
— Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
Deep Keanu: What if we’re dying, and everything we experience is just our lives flashing in front of us.
Oh glob, my hands are huge. he he he he he he he.
The Urban Dictionary definitions of “hector” are right strange.
I had some ‘experiences’ during an induced coma that were rather intense, and at the time (well, after they woke me up) they really shook me. It’s been nearly ten years now. After a year of struggling with it (at the time I wasn’t finding any good information about such things very easily) there was a bit of a breakthrough when I heard a noise playing on the radio that nearly made me jump out of my car, and I was able to tie the sound of some monster from a nightmare to the noise of a respirator.
The other thing I remember around that time is how easily experiences like these were interpreted by believers of every stripe around me. That stuff was easy to find! And any time I did reach out a bit, whether it was xian friends and family, or the odd pagan relative…they were quite prepared to fold my experiences into their belief systems, and it would have been easy to fall for that. The experiences themselves were intense and compelling, kind of demanding some explanation or meaning.
It was a difficult year for me as a skeptic. But I came out of it, I think, with some slight degree of understanding about the power of personal experience and why people fall into those easy religious interpretation-traps. Religion seems well equipped to use such things, and seems to have a long history of doing so. The offering of meaningful interpretation, it’s tempting. Whereas the more mundane explanation that I do have…well, I don’t even want to admit to my folks that some of what they kept busy with in the hospital had any effect on me. I think they’d be horrified to know.
A theme song for this post, perhaps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQ9fpvSMNI
I was into ESP as a kid, and remember going into restaurant that had an odd special going on. They were selling banana splits, and the deal was you pick one of the balloons tied to poles in the restaurant and paid the price written on a piece of paper within the balloon. I was with my mother, and we decided that this would be a good test of ESP.
When the time came, the waitress came over and asked me what balloon I wanted. I closed my eyes, saw red and said it was a red balloon. She looked at me kind of strangely and then reached for a red balloon. “This one?” I said no, the one closer in to the pole.
She kind of freaked when we popped the balloon and it said 1 cent.
The memory aspect of this is that when I talked to my mother decades after, she remembered my doing this twice and being told not to come back.
In the mid 80s, I got Ramen for $0.06/pack. They have like 10,000 mg of salt, but who cares? The 17-19-year-old body is quite resilient.
Another money-saver was to get Mac and Cheese in bulk at $0.10US/box. Use cheap vegetable oil instead of milk, because you don’t have a fridge, just a hot plate.
The bit about memory: our brains interpret what our eyes see. That’s how optical illusions work, except the brain is misinterpreting the eyes.
Just like the bibble requiring ‘interpretation’, our memories sometimes do as well.
I can see how they wouldn’t exactly be satisfied with this response. You’re saying they don’t have perfectly reliable and detailed experiences of everything when you have a memory. So, trying to squeeze all of your moment-by-moment experiences throughout your life into a short timespan just isn’t going to work.
Then, as themadtapper points out in #6, some might want to claim it’s miraculous that so much (however much it is) happened so quickly, while they were supposedly “near death.” Must be magic.
But I’m still kind of scratching my head at that too. What they should be saying, if they’re trying to be consistent, is not simply that this happens very quickly (and with great fidelity, etc.), but that it’s not something which happens in spacetime at all. The essential idea they want to push is that we have non-physical souls which do the job of having ordinary experiences/memories. Being non-physical objects, they definitionally aren’t made of anything like matter nor are they existing in spacetime. That is the thing which they think “lives forever” (meaning they exist, in this non-physical way) in some sort of afterlife. It allegedly still has “experiences” (since it has nothing else to do) of something but not of anything physical — no idea what kind of relationship that is supposed to be. And they want to point to some kind of evidence for that, so they come up with this bullshit.
I don’t have a great solution to the mind-body problem of course, and maybe it’s because I can’t even wrap my head around the basic idea (when I break down this whole chain of logic) that experiences aren’t in spacetime. By that point, it’s not at all clear to me what kind of idea this person thinks they have. I mean, they’re presumably agreeing that we have physical bodies, that physical events happen, and that we can somehow or another be aware of those events. But they think “awareness itself” (as if it’s a thing like a soul) is supposed to be somehow a fundamentally different thing than the physical stuff it’s about. And then I’m lost. What the hell do they think they’re talking about?
Marcus @7
Yeah, pretty sure this message came from the horse not god. Actually pretty much straight from the horses mouth or back side anyway.
I used to have a fantastic memory. Now, age and chronic pain have ruined my short-term memory, but the long-term memory seems to be intact.
I used to be great at test-taking. I would read a page from a textbook and later, during the test, I could close my eyes and “see” that page to locate the answer to the question that I was seeking. I’ve also always been great with maps and navigating for my husband, who is not great at finding his way around. I can use a map to find my way somewhere, and then find it again years later without the map.
When I finally met my father, I found out that he was tested during the Korean conflict for having a photographic memory. The army used his uncanny map reading skills and his memory in ways that he refused to talk about.
My son seems to have inherited the same skills. His boy scout troop loved him in the orienteering competition. Each team had only 5 minutes to study a map before being dropped off in the woods to race back to base camp. My son was the troop’s secret weapon. He would study the map and lead his team out first nearly every time.
I’m no scientist, so I don’t understand how our brains do this, or how it seems to be passed from one generation to the next. It is interesting that my son strongly resembles my father, and that the daughter who most strongly resembles my husband is as bad at directions as he is.
Anyone have some scientific explanations?
There is evidence that the brains stores memories as “archetypes.” We have a very small number of memories about say, the taste of bacon; a kind of daemon structure in the brain assembles that archetype with the archetypes of how toast crunches, the smell of butter, the setting of the kitchen table and many other pieces to create a single comprehensive memory of breakfast. One researcher I know described it as a paint-by-number kit: your brain stores pots of color and a collection of templates, and then paints the picture on demand. That is why memory is so elastic: it does not take much to change a template or even add a brand new one, and the brain cannot tell the difference. That is also why details fade, as the template for “breakfast” gets reused and overwritten. Different types of eidetic memory arise when someone is able to store a greater variety of more specific archetypes, or creates more detailed templates, or is less likely to reuse templates, or stores those templates using a more effective indexing system.
It seems that, during a NDE, the brain begins to randomly fire much as it does during REM sleep. Unlike sleep, though, both the consciousness — the part of the brain that imposes order and derives meaning from sensor input — and the memory daemon are working. The result is that A. the memory daemon is pulling up random templates and painting them with the random signals, and B. the consciousness is writing an ad hoc narrative to make sense of the confusion. This is why NDEs largely conform to the person’s expectations: Christians will have a Christian NDE, Buddhists will have a Buddhist NDE, Muslims will have a Muslim NDE, those who believe they will have an eternal reward see themselves in that place, people who believe they will have an eternal punishment see themselves in that place, and people whose core beliefs are non-religious will have a non-religious NDE. That can be a profound experience, no doubt, but it is hardly a spiritual one.
@magistramarla #17 – Long term and short term memory seem to use different mechanics; damage one part of the brain and you lose the ability to retrieve long-term memories; damage a different part, and you will have access to long-term memories but be unable to create new ones; damage a different part, and you lose the ability to create short-term memories but have no problem recollecting stuff that happened before the damage. There are a number of age-related issues that can have a similar effect, and you may want to discuss the matter with your doctor.
As for heritability, brain structure and organization almost certainly has a genetic component. If you and your father have excellent memories and navigation skills, it is reasonable to think that offspring who inherited those genes would have that potential, too.
Now there is a constructed memory. I was a graduate student until ’82 and Ramen was definitely a staple.
There is evidence that the brains stores memories as “archetypes.
Computer types: think “compression tables”
I was eating ramen in the 1970s.
In larger cities, not in my small hometown.
consciousness razor #15 wrote:
They’re not necessarily thinking about anything in any detail. It’s all on the surface, the sense that one’s mind is so completely different than one’s body that both our language and our concepts can’t handle it. Couple this to mystical or anomalous brain states which mess with the coherence between self and other, or experience and significance, and the view that an inability to make sense of what happened within the normal scheme of things means we’ve gone outside of physical reality is irresistible if you’re already primed to think this is true wisdom.
One of the things to remember is that reason, intellect, and the sort of curiosity which digs at things and considers and tests natural alternatives are often considered a sign of arrogance, immaturity, ego, fear, or “shallow thinking” in the Spiritual framework. The exact opposite of how we tend to regard it.
I once had a dream in which I was piloting a plane which had some sort of malfunction so that I was rapidly plummeting to the ground. I knew I was going to die and my entire life played out in my head in just a few seconds. Or so it seemed. I was also filled with the most beautiful sense of peace and acceptance. I hit the ground and it went black and I immediately woke up. I’ve never had another dream like it.
The ability to step back from that and regard it as an experience which reveals something about how the brain works instead of a special glimpse into the nature of reality is, I think, partly a result of maturity and partly learned. The natural and rather childish tendency is to want to view ourselves as reliable, connect subjective experience directly to objective reality — and then stop thinking too much.
Not actually relevant but I envy you that constructed memory PZ. You certainly experienced some ‘archetypal’ Ray Bradbury summer life to construct that from the detritus of an actual life.
magistramarla #17 – Long term and short term memory seem to use different mechanics; damage one part of the brain and you lose the ability to retrieve long-term memories; damage a different part, and you will have access to long-term memories but be unable to create new ones;
Anterograde amnesia. I had that for a while after a head injury and skull fracture.
I was awake and interacting with others for an couple of weeks but unable to form new memories so I couldn’t remember what had just happened before.
Of course, they only way I know this is because that’s what they told me afterward, AND because of a transition period of about 1 day where things were starting to “stick” again as I healed.
My actually experience of not being able to form new memories was – nothingness. Though talking etc., (nonsensically) from MY perspective I didn’t exist. No continuity.
During the “fading back in part” its as you would expect – an edited video tape… a few seconds followed by a few more seconds that it turns out chronologically were not actually adjacent moments.
A good whack on the head could clue some people in to the fact that YOU are merely a product of the workings of your brain.
Either that, or a year or two of experimenting with various drugs.
Both can work.
meh, borked the blockquote as usual.
stoopid brain.
Get ready for a lot more of the NDE kooks to pop their heads up. There’s a credulous NDE article in the latest edition of the Atlantic. (Arrived at my house a couple of days ago and reminded me why I didn’t renew my subscription.)
Sure, but I was trying to (briefly) make the best case for them that I can. I know lots of theists don’t put much thought into it at all, but as you know, at least since Descartes, that’s been the idea of substance dualism. If they’re being inconsistent with that whole general ideology, then they’re in even worse shape.
I’m sure altered states and so forth help drive people off the rails like that, but I don’t think that’s really central to it. We have this strange problem: we don’t know how consciousness happens. It’s certainly not obvious how we could explain it with particles moving around in some terribly complicated way, even when it comes to totally mundane experiences like me being aware of my computer monitor right now. If I just placed my chair in front of the monitor, it wouldn’t be aware of that (or anything at all), despite the fact that we’re both composed of particles moving around in some terribly complicated way. So what’s going on? How does that happen? Nobody has figured that out yet. We use words like “complicated” to talk about the chair and “even more complicated” to talk about my brain, but just saying that sort of thing doesn’t get me any closer to understanding it.
Of course dualists have all of that to worry about (or get confused about), but instead of coming up with a real explanation about how brains do what they do (which doesn’t seem to be interesting to them at all), they give themselves more problems: how physical and non-physical things interact, what awareness (or agency, intention, etc.) would even mean if it’s a concept that doesn’t involve spatial or temporal relationships, and so on. It’s ridiculous, but I guess it’s convenient that they’re not interested in actually explaining anything, because explaining things which don’t happen would be awfully difficult.
@Usernames! #14: Actually you would be using the oil to replace the butter/margarine, if you want to replace the milk you can just use water, (I’ve done that enough times with KD).
@18/Gregory
The “kooks” got me too, unfortunately. Explanations like this are very helpful antidotes to that particular brand of kookery, and you’re also spot-on; people see what they expect to see.
We also don’t usually hear about kids who see Mario (as in “it’s-a-me, I’m-a here to set Italian’s-a back a hundred years!” Mario) or similar things. Those happen too.
I have distinct memories of watching the Challenger disaster when I was in high school. I can picture the hallway, the classroom, the TV. Except, the Challenger disaster happened when I was a junior in college.
@Jafafa Hots #26
Now THAT is the beginning of wisdom.
@6
it just occurred to me that it it might be the other way around it was not religion that elevated faith but it was faith that was elevated into religion.
As demonstrated by this discussion we want to believe the memory how ever fragmentary and incomplete we unconsciously reconstruct it and it becomes the real reality.
Our first reaction is to think what we see and remember is the real regardless of the demonstrable inaccuracy our senses and memory can be. Faith
uncle frogy
The negative or hellish NDEs really did scare me though. Some paranoid part of me is afraid someone’s last moments get stretched out into a subjective eternity, and if you happen to have a bad NDE for no reason other than anxiety disorder or abusive religious upbringing, you do “go to hell” in a sense.
My favourite ESP-like happening was at a church run quiz night fund raiser I attended some 20 years ago. The minister was drawing the raffle prizes and then he held up the last one. He intoned “and now we have this lovely basket of chocolates” and in a fit of passion I shouted out loud “It’s mine!!!” After a short pause the minister drew my winning ticket number. For a little while I basked in the glow of belief in the certain mental connection with a basket of inanimate goodies. The foul tempered look on the minister’s face was worth it, as he knew he had been upstaged in the miracles delivery department. Twas fun to believe that winning with 100 to one odds were miraculous but soon after I read a bit about probability and munched my way through the brown stuff and went back to rational thinking.
A few years ago I thought it might be fun to write a blog starting with my earliest memories and going on from there – a sort of autobiographical blog.
But when it came to recording my memories I was stunned to discover that most of them lasted only a few seconds. Like the day I fell in the creek and quickly scrambled out again. I remember saying to the other kids, “Did you see me floating,” but that’s it! That’s all I’ve got. There is nothing else. I can’t remember what happened a second before I fell in and I can’t remember what happened a second afterwards – but those three seconds in the water are crystal clear to me.
consciousness razor #28 wrote:
It’s even more convenient than that, I think. Within the spiritual ‘paradigm’ reductive explanations are literally impossible, regardless of whether we have an actual example. The whole point of the supernatural is that mental things CAN’T be reduced to anything other than what they are. They’re not supposed to be subject to the rules which govern the physical world, let alone the sort of analysis which breaks them down into components.
Coming up with a step-by-step explanation of “how things work” when we’re dealing with the idea of an Awareness outside of space and time (or in its own, special meta-space and meta-time) isn’t so much uninteresting to believers as self-refuting. So it’s all handwaving “explanations” of correspondence, power, energy, and agency divorced from any requirement to be consistent with what we already know through science — and that’s if we’re lucky. The usual rebuttal is to compare ourselves to children and embrace the humbling position of a complete and proud ignorance.
Figures, I plan to post something, and I’m beaten to it inside the first 10 comments. Thank you Pierce R. Butler at #8.
I’ve had mystical experiences on several occasions. It was wonderful and dramatically changed my view on life. Contributing something so special to the supernatural would be a waste and a shame. The world doesn’t become prettier assuming it is run by woo.
@empty #20:
In the UK it was Pot Noodles*. You could define the relative personal wealth of a student in the early and mid-80s by the number** of Pot Noodles they ate.
*Warning: Leads to commercial advertising shit.
**Possibly related to the amount of beer they drank.
When I took a bend too fast and went off the road a couple of years ago, I wasn’t conscious of anything but the sensations of the moment: the realisation that I’d fucked up, the sense of losing control, the rapidity of going up the bank, through a fence and finally scraping a tree. That should have been a perfect moment for a deity to lay some NDE vision on me, so that I could reflect on the bad choices that led me there, presumably.
But that didn’t happen, because I was conscious all the way through; besides banging my knee on the dashboard and maybe rattling my brain in my skull a bit, I suffered no injury. If anyone ever does have a life-flashing-before-their-eyes moment outside of cheap fiction, I think they have to have the leisure to experience it and/or some consciousness altering physiological event, such as concussion or fainting due to shock or blood loss. Or maybe just the time and inclination to ask themselves how they wound up in the situation.
Two other people have told me they can do that. One can actually read the page in their memory, the other one can’t and – frustratingly – only remembers where on the page the answer was.
By the time I was at Uni in the 2010’s, Super Noodles and other, even cheaper, shop-brands had replaced them. And for good reason; Pot Noodles are fucking horrible.
By the time I was at Uni in the late 2010’s, Super Noodles (and other, even cheaper, shop-brands) had replaced Pot Noodles as the cheap student food of choice. And for good reason; Pot Noodles are fucking horrible.