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Study suggests that the brain is still aware for a period after the heart stops

RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Auto_aim1 said:
Heart-stopping is death.

Brain dies your body is still alive. That's how organ donations are possible in the first place.
Click to expand...

That might be the traditional way of determining whether or not someone is dead, but I strongly disagree with it. A person is alive as long as the brain is working. That's where everything that makes that person a person is. The heart is just a muscle that pumps blood to keep the brain (and other body parts) going, and there's really no reason to say that the person is "dead" the moment that pumping stops. A person whose heart stops and is then restarted before the brain dies was never dead, IMO.
 
B

Baron von Loathsome

Member
Garmonbozia said:
bfaD9H7.gif
Click to expand...

I suggest you get yourself a pen.
 
Z

ZOONAMI

Junior Member
Given the amount of out of body experiences people have this doesn’t surprise me at all. Your consciousness can actually separate itself from your body y’all, not just chill inside your brain for a bit after you die.
 
J

JoeBoy101

Member
robotrock said:
cremate me
Click to expand...

But what if you're aware when cremated???!?

I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement -– and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds.
Click to expand...

Good. Scared the shit out of me there for a second, must be reading too much SCP. 30 seconds i'm cool with. So long as I'm not aware for cremation.

But yeah, this is just semantics with 'death' being defined as heart stopping. Its really not over until the brain's done.
 
Auto_aim1

Auto_aim1

MeisaMcCaffrey
RoadHazard said:
That might be the traditional way of determining whether or not someone is dead, but I strongly disagree with it. A person is alive as long as the brain is working. That's where everything that makes that person a person is. The heart is just a muscle that pumps blood to keep the brain (and other body parts) going, and there's really no reason to say that the person is "dead" the moment that pumping stops. A person whose heart stops and is then restarted before the brain dies was never dead, IMO.
Click to expand...
But that depends on external factors. Sure, you can keep a person with multiple organ failure alive in the hospital. Let's take medical assistance out of the equation. If your heart fails you're dead.
 
R

Roubjon

Member
Finale Fireworker said:
I knew somebody who had a near-death experience when she was a late-teenager. Her and her friend were speeding and drove straight off the road when they missed a turn and hit a particularly menacing tree. The car was totaled and they both very nearly died.

The person I knew was the passenger. She said she wasn't even aware they were speeding. They were listening to the Riot Album by Paramore. She was really into it and singing along and the impact of the accident was extremely sudden to her. She had zero awareness it was about to happen until they actually crashed.

She described having her entire life pass before her eyes - just like the cliche - and even though it was instantaneous it was a "deep instant." She felt like that single second in time reached deeper beneath a different axis of time and she was able to fully re-experience her entire existence in the moment that flashed after the impact. Then she lost consciousness.

In the wake of the accident and during her recovery, she started to realize she now had two memories of everything that ever happened. There was the original memory from when she first experienced them and the second memory from when she experienced them again during the accident. She felt like she lived her entire life twice, in equal proportion, and had double memories of everything that happened before the crash.

So every time she remembered something from her life before her accident, she would have this sickening deja vu feeling. She described it as a 3D image improperly aligned. There's an image underneath in blue and the same image on top in red, but they don't line up right. They're askew. So the blue memory is all the normal feelings and emotions she felt when the memory originally happened, but the red memory only conjured up feelings of extreme terror. She said it was like looking at old photographs and noticing the grim reaper in every photo. And as you flip through the photo album and see yourself as a baby, and as a little kid, and graduating high school, there is a cloaked figure you never noticed before that seems to be as much the subject of the photo as you are.

But worst of all, she remembered her death.

Her double memories end abruptly at the accident. Everything after the accident she remembers normally. So, to her, this termination points feels like her death. So she remembers a timeline of her life where she was killed at 19. When she thinks about herself, there is a prevailing and nagging thought that she was killed in the accident.

And she remembers that girl. She knows that girl. That girl was her. That girl is dead.

She can't listen to Paramore anymore because it brings up too many memories. Twice as many as they should, and some that abruptly end. She doesn't like to revisit the moment she went askew.
Click to expand...

That's a story worth thinking about.
 
B

Bakercat

Member
Imagine dying in someone's arms and you're trying to figure what's going on and you hear someone else say that you're gone. You've got a few minutes to realize that this is it while unable to move and you quietly have to come to the fact that you'll be gone forever.
 
Razorback

Razorback

Member
Auto_aim1 said:
But that depends on external factors. Sure, you can keep a person with multiple organ failure alive in the hospital. Let's take medical assistance out of the equation. If your heart fails you're dead.
Click to expand...

Why are you making this more complicated than it has to be?

YOU = YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.
 
B

Brock Reiher

Banned
RoadHazard said:
That might be the traditional way of determining whether or not someone is dead, but I strongly disagree with it. A person is alive as long as the brain is working. That's where everything that makes that person a person is. The heart is just a muscle that pumps blood to keep the brain (and other body parts) going, and there's really no reason to say that the person is "dead" the moment that pumping stops. A person whose heart stops and is then restarted before the brain dies was never dead, IMO.
Click to expand...
You're talking about personhood rather than life.

And this isn't a new discovery or anything. Of course your mind stays alive after you die for a little bit, otherwise CPR would never work. The awareness you feel as all your systems begin to shut down is why a lot of people see they can see the afterlife and shit during near death experiences.
 
A

AEREC

Member
That's a creepy ass thought...surely cremation would change things though.

Now if you were in a Dream state after death then maybe that would be better?
 
Audioboxer

Audioboxer

Member
Death is a social construct. Checkmate atheists.

I think many of us have had some general angst about situations like this for a while, when we die due to non-brain related organ failure, such as something with the heart/lungs shutting down.

If it can be proven, then as many would speculate it would probably be for a very short amount of time, and you can't really conceptualize that time as being like 30 seconds of how they are right now. When the brain is having its oxygen supply cut off you're more likely to be in a state of delirium/panic/some sort of inability to think logically/correctly/properly/etc.

I very much doubt it would be like the out of body experience people picture where for 30 seconds they just calmly listen, coherently, to people crying and saying prayers. Some of us will find out soon enough ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
F

Foffy

Banned
I imagine it's because death is a process, as it's a happening. We think of death as a flick of a switch; you're either here or you're not.

This of course doesn't mean we have souls that survive the body, but that sentience here is a process. Does your blood or lungs freeze when you die? No, there's slight continuation of activity until they "settle" as the mechanisms for their function dissolve away. Why would sentience be any different?
 
B

Brock Reiher

Banned
Audioboxer said:
Death is a social construct. Checkmate atheists.

I think many of us have had some general angst about situations like this for a while, when we die due to non-brain related organ failure, such as something with the heart/lungs shutting down.

If it can be proven, then as many would speculate it would probably be for a very short amount of time, and you can't really conceptualize that time as being like 20 seconds of how they are right now. When the brain is having its oxygen supply cut off you're more likely to be in a state of delirium/panic/some sort of inability to think logically/correctly/properly/etc.

I very much doubt it would be like the out of body experience people picture where for 30 seconds they just calmly listen, coherently, to people crying and saying prayers. Some of us will find out soon enough ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Click to expand...
It would be like a dope ass trip dude
 
C

CrunchyFrog

Member
phisheep said:
From Dr Beaurieux's report:
Click to expand...

That's not terribly surprising. All else being normal the brain (and really the whole body) primarily needs an oxygen supply to operate in the near term and if the decapitation is low enough on the neck you've probably still got most of the cerebral nerves necessary for motor functions in the head (your oculomotor nerve, responsible for most of your eye movement, is CN3 and so actually one of the highest sitting ones along the cervical spine). So long as the brain has some locally or the tissue has been mostly/fully perfused before losing it then it can still function for a while. It's why you can stay alive while holding your breath (though much longer than in decapitation since you still have latent oxygen rich blood pumping toward the brain from your pulmonary veins onward). It's not necessarily blood loss itself that usually kills you per se, it's the fact that losing blood causes your tissues to become ischemic and cease metabolic activity from lack of oxygen supply (among other nutrients and factors like osmotic pressure) and then causing cell/tissue death in your various organs/brain. Theoretically if you could somehow restore oxygen supply then you might even be able to survive for a few minutes more! At least until other fun effects start to set in like depletion of glucose, CSF, loss of vascular tone, etc.. Usually I'd say you'd still die from circulatory shock, but does that count if for all intents and purposes you have no circulatory system? Hmmm
 
G

greycolumbus

The success of others absolutely infuriates me.
Finale Fireworker said:
I knew somebody who had a near-death experience when she was a late-teenager. Her and her friend were speeding and drove straight off the road when they missed a turn and hit a particularly menacing tree. The car was totaled and they both very nearly died.

The person I knew was the passenger. She said she wasn't even aware they were speeding. They were listening to the Riot Album by Paramore. She was really into it and singing along and the impact of the accident was extremely sudden to her. She had zero awareness it was about to happen until they actually crashed.

She described having her entire life pass before her eyes - just like the cliche - and even though it was instantaneous it was a "deep instant." She felt like that single second in time reached deeper beneath a different axis of time and she was able to fully re-experience her entire existence in the moment that flashed after the impact. Then she lost consciousness.

In the wake of the accident and during her recovery, she started to realize she now had two memories of everything that ever happened. There was the original memory from when she first experienced them and the second memory from when she experienced them again during the accident. She felt like she lived her entire life twice, in equal proportion, and had double memories of everything that happened before the crash.

So every time she remembered something from her life before her accident, she would have this sickening deja vu feeling. She described it as a 3D image improperly aligned. There's an image underneath in blue and the same image on top in red, but they don't line up right. They're askew. So the blue memory is all the normal feelings and emotions she felt when the memory originally happened, but the red memory only conjured up feelings of extreme terror. She said it was like looking at old photographs and noticing the grim reaper in every photo. And as you flip through the photo album and see yourself as a baby, and as a little kid, and graduating high school, there is a cloaked figure you never noticed before that seems to be as much the subject of the photo as you are.

But worst of all, she remembered her death.

Her double memories end abruptly at the accident. Everything after the accident she remembers normally. So, to her, this termination points feels like her death. So she remembers a timeline of her life where she was killed at 19. When she thinks about herself, there is a prevailing and nagging thought that she was killed in the accident.

And she remembers that girl. She knows that girl. That girl was her. That girl is dead.

She can't listen to Paramore anymore because it brings up too many memories. Twice as many as they should, and some that abruptly end. She doesn't like to revisit the moment she went askew.
Click to expand...

That's a haunting story.
 
D

Dali

Member
DBT85 said:
I always figured that anyway. Just because your heart stops doesn't mean the brain has stopped doing shit for a few moments.

Imagine having your head chopped off and seeing the crowd/sky/crowd/sky.
Click to expand...
There are actually several accounts of people being decapitated showing signs of "oh shit" in their expression before dying.
 
C

Capra

Member
So what you're saying is, make sure I die in a way that destroys my cognitive functions so as to minimize the eternity I'll have to contemplate my own death. Good to know.
 
Z

ZOONAMI

Junior Member
Liljagare said:
Here is a cool video about OOB experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee4-grU_6vs

They have a few, Karolinska is the major hospital in Stockholm.

Basically, your brain is fooled that it is at the cameras position.
Click to expand...

I don’t see how this definitively proves anything about OBEs. It just proves that you react from the perspective of a VR headset even if you realize you are tricking yourself. In this set up you consciously wouldn’t believe you are in a different position in the room, even though you react to first person visual stimuli. Read the reply by groovyunicorns on there lol.
 
E

erlim

yes, that talented of a member
I thought it was common knowledge that brain death happened a little after official death. That's why people's eyes blinked after they were beheaded back in the day?
 
L

Linkstrikesback

Member
erlim said:
I thought it was common knowledge that brain death happened a little after official death. That's why people's eyes blinked after they were beheaded back in the day?
Click to expand...

This was my thought too. I was under the impression this has been known for a while. I believe the experiment (as horrifying as it was) was when some guy who was being put to the guillotine, they took his head, now separate from his body, called his name , and for a small amount of time, he was capable of noticing (displayed eye movement towards the person calling in response, couldn't speak for obvious reasons).
 
Auto_aim1

Auto_aim1

MeisaMcCaffrey
The worst thing I feel could happen is during surgery when your body is paralyzed but you're 'awake' due to a botched up anaesthesia dose. I think there was a movie on this recently.
 
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