Mary Roach: preference

Transcript context

…You think most people or all people have it, but not all remember it? I don’t know whether most people do, but I know for sure that most people forget everything that happens in the OR now because of the . . . Versed is one of the drugs that’s used, and people are coming out of surgery — it’s very, very rare now that anybody said, “Darndest thing, I was floating up above and . . .” They just don’t remember anything. My favorite study from Spook, my second book, was a University of Virginia psychologist who studies near-death experience, had this idea, because near-death people who’ve had a near-death experience often report floating in the operating room, looking down onto their body on the operating table. So in this, specifically, an operating room where they put in defibrillators, which they then test by flat-lining you, and then making sure the defibrillator will — [laughter] Hope that works. They put a laptop computer, open, up on top of one of the banks of lamps with a randomly generated simple image, so that if the person travelled up there, left the body, and looked down, not only would they see their body, but they would notice, “Huh, that’s peculiar. There’s a laptop computer here with a flower,” or whatever it is. Then, when they came out of surgery, they routinely interviewed people, “Did you remember anything about your experience?” And they gave up because nobody remembered anything. Why are bedpans dangerous? [laughter]…

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