127 Hours: How the Brain Invents a Future audio documentary cover
Survival 21 min

127 Hours: How the Brain Invents a Future

He saw a son who didn't exist. Six hours later, he cut off his arm.

Trapped under a boulder in a Utah canyon for six days, Aron Ralston cut off his own arm after hallucinating a blond son he did not have. The hallucination was not a side effect of dehydration. It was the mechanism: a brain manufacturing a fictional future to motivate the body when the rational case for survival had run out.

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