So, it might be the case that, were you to be decapitated, you could see your own headless
body before you die.
Good luck sleeping tonight guys!
Hello everyone!
Amy with you on DNews this Monday, and Monday means we’re doing a viewer question!
EMU MON asked whether a person or animal can survive being decapitated, and if so, how?
Oy.
Dark, man.
Creepy though the thought may be, questions about humans surviving decapitation aren’t
new.
There are reports of severed heads reacting or even trying to speak going back centuries.
One particularly chilling story comes from Dr. Gabriel Beaurieux who studied a beheading
in 1905.
The condemned man’s head was cleanly severed by a guillotine blade and left to fall into
a basket at which point the face started twitching.
Then, when Beaurieux called out the dead man’s name, the severed head’s eyes lifted up
and met Beaurieux’s in the same way, he later wrote, that any whole person’s would
when pulled from a daydream.
There’s actually some modern scientific evidence to support the idea that the dead
man’s look might have been a somewhat conscious reaction.
In 2011, Dutch scientists ran an experiment on mice to see how decapitation affected their
neurologic activity.
They hooked an electroencephalograph or EEG to the brains of the doomed mice, cut off
their heads, then measured brain activity in the severed heads.
Incredibly, the results showed electrical activity continued in the brains at frequencies
indicating conscious activity for almost four seconds.
Similar studies done on smaller animals suggest that brain activity can last even longer once
the head is no longer attached to its body.
If that four seconds ball-park time extends to human decapitation, that’s well long
enough for a victim to take in their surroundings before dying.
New York City medical examiner Jonathan Hayes also confirms it’s possible.
Writing for New York Magazine, he explains that If someone’s heart stops, they could
be conscious for up to fifteen seconds as the brain burns through the last of its oxygenated
blood.
Of course, that time would decrease with blood loss associated with a beheading, but the
fact remains that there would be some blood in the severed brain for a few seconds, which
could mean a few seconds of consciousness.
Decapitation means the head has been cut cleanly at the neck, severing the spinal cord at the
same time.
So no severed head could just regain the connections with a body that would allow the brain to
control the limbs.
There's no way you could survive that kind of decapitation.
Unless you happen to be decapitated during a whole head transplant…
then, maybe, you could.
Dr Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy proposed the controversial
idea for a head transplant as something wants to use on patients whose muscles and nerves
have degenerated, fusing their sound mind with an equally sound body.
He’s developed a technique involving fusing the spinal cord.
The process involves cooling the to-be-transplanted head to extend how long the cells can live
without oxygen.
Next he’d dissect the tissue around the neck, tie off the major the blood vessels,
then cut the spinal cord.
Then the recipient’s head is moved onto the donor body and the two ends of the spinal
cord are fused together.
This is the most delicate part of the process.
Canavero hopes to do this fusion by flushing the area with polyethylene glycol followed
by injections of the same material at regular intervals.
If it works, the process will be akin to spaghetti sticking together in hot water: the cells
membranes in the two spinal cords would mesh.
From there, the new hybrid human would be kept in a coma for up to a month with electrodes
stimulating the spinal cord.
Within a year, Canavero says, the patient would be able to walk.
Of course, the head is foreign to the body so the immune system would likely reject the
head.
Canavero says he should be able to manage this part of the process with drugs.
But a successful head transplant has never been done, and experts say it’s probably
impossible.
Bodyless heads talking and head transplants sounds like Victorian mad science to me.
But thanks for your question anyway, EMU MON!
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