This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
What if you knew when you were going to die?
How would it change the way you lived your life?
I do feel like this is the year.
I need to be very careful.
The way you relate to others, to your work.
It's something that I just had held so close to my heart or to myself.
And so I hesitated.
I wondered if I should share it.
Would you feel unshackled from community norms, cut off other cars in traffic and show up drunk to work?
Would you take that trip you've always wanted and try to squeeze every last pleasure from life?
Or would you try to do all the good that was possible in the moments you had left?
You know, if I don't make it through this year, there's some things I want to get finished up.
This week on hidden brain, a premonition that haunted one man for decades, and what the knowledge of death can tell us about a life well lived.
One night, when Paul Burnham was 15 years old, he had a dream.
In the dream, I was traveling kind of on a flat area or in a deep canyon, and I was in the very bottom of it.
And on either side of me were just these enormous cliffs.
And the walls were just 1000ft, just these huge, these enormous walls.
I felt like someone was with me there, maybe behind me.