Does the brain continue to live and perceive the world around it for a few minutes after the head instantly flies off its shoulders, as, for example, on the guillotine?
On Wednesday, 125 years have passed since the last execution by beheading in Denmark, and in this regard, a terrible question came from the reader: Does a person die instantly when his head is cut off?
“I just once heard that the brain dies from blood loss only a few minutes after the head was cut off, that is, people executed, for example, on the guillotine, in principle, could“see”and“hear”the environment, although they were already dead. Is it true? Annette asks.
The thought of being able to see your own headless body in anyone you want will cause a shudder, and in fact this question arose several hundred years ago, when the guillotine was used as a humane method of execution after the French Revolution.
The severed head turned red
The revolution was a real bloodbath, during which 14 thousand heads were chopped off from March 1793 to August 1794.
And it was then that the question that interested our reader was first raised - this happened in connection with the guillotine execution of Charlotte Corday, sentenced to death, the woman who killed the leader of the revolutionaries Jean-Paul Marat.
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After the execution, rumors spread that when one of the revolutionaries took her severed head out of a basket and slapped her in the face, his face was contorted with anger. There were also those who claimed to have seen her blush from the insult.
But could this really happen?
The brain can live a little
“She couldn't blush anyway, because it takes blood pressure,” says zoophysiology professor Tobias Wang at Aarhus University, where he studies blood circulation and metabolism, among other things.
Nevertheless, he cannot decisively rule out that after the cutting off of her head, she was still conscious for some time.
“With our brain, the fact is that its mass is only 2% of the entire body, while it consumes about 20% of energy. The brain itself does not have a store of glycogen (energy depot - approx. Videnskab), so as soon as the blood supply stops, it immediately ends up in the hands of the Lord, so to speak."
In other words, the question is how long the brain has enough energy, and the professor would not be surprised if it lasted at least a couple of seconds.
If we turn to his fiefdom - zoology, then there is at least one species of animals, about which it is known that their head can continue to live without a body: these are reptiles.
Severed turtle heads can live for a few more days
On YouTube, for example, you can find frightening videos where the heads of snakes without a body quickly click their mouths, ready to dig into the victim with their long, poisonous teeth.
This is possible because reptiles have a very slow metabolism, so if their heads are intact, their brains can continue to live.
"The turtles stand out especially," says Tobias Wang, and talks about a colleague who had to use turtles' brains for experiments and put the severed heads in the refrigerator, assuming they would, of course, die there.
“But they lived for another two or three days,” says Tobias Wang, adding that this, like the guillotine question, creates an ethical dilemma.
"In terms of animal ethics, the fact that turtles' heads do not die immediately after being removed from the body can be a problem."
"When we need a turtle's brain, and at the same time it should not contain any anesthetics, we put our head in liquid nitrogen, and then it dies instantly," the scientist explains.
Lavoisier winked from the basket
Returning to us humans, Tobias Wang told the famous story about the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794.
"As one of the greatest scientists in history, he asked his good friend, the mathematician Lagrange, to count how many times he would wink after his head was severed."
Thus, Lavoisier was going to make his last contribution to science, trying to help answer the question of whether a person remains conscious after cutting off the head.
He was going to blink once a second, and, according to some stories, he blinked 10 times, and according to others - 30 times, but all this, as Tobias Wand says, unfortunately, is still a myth.
According to science historian William B. Jensen of the University of Cincinnati in the United States, the wink is not mentioned in any of Lavoisier's recognized biographies, which, however, say that Lagrange was present at the execution but was in the corner of the square - too far away to complete your part of the experiment.
The severed head looked at the doctor
The guillotine was introduced as a symbol of a new, humanistic order in society. Therefore, rumors about Charlotte Corday and others were completely out of place and generated a lively scientific debate among doctors in France, England and Germany.
The question was never answered satisfactorily, and it came up again and again until 1905, when one of the most convincing experiments on human heads was carried out.
This experiment was described by the French doctor Beaurieux, who conducted it with the head of Henri Languille, sentenced to death.
As Boryo describes, immediately after guillotining, he noted that Langil's lips and eyes moved spasmodically for 5-6 seconds, after which the movement stopped. And when Dr. Boryo, a couple of seconds later, loudly shouted "Langil!", His eyes opened, the pupils focused and looked intently at the doctor, as if he had awakened the person from sleep.
“I saw undoubtedly living eyes that looked at me,” writes Boryo.
After that, the eyelids dropped, but the doctor again managed to wake the convict's head by calling out his name, and only on the third attempt did nothing happen.
Not minutes but seconds
This story is not a scientific account in the modern sense, and Tobias Wang doubts that a person can really be conscious for that long.
“I believe that a couple of seconds is really possible,” he says, and says that reflexes and muscle contractions may remain, but the brain itself suffers from colossal blood loss and falls into a coma, so that the person quickly loses consciousness.
This estimate is supported by a field-proven rule known to cardiologists, which states that in cardiac arrest, the brain remains conscious for up to four seconds if a person is standing, up to eight seconds if he is sitting, and up to 12 seconds when lying down.
As a result, we have not really clarified whether the head can retain consciousness after being cut off from the body: minutes, of course, are excluded, but the version about seconds does not look incredible.
And if you count: one, two, three - you can easily make sure that this is enough to become aware of the environment, which means that this method of execution has nothing to do with humanity.
The guillotine has become a symbol of a new, humane society
The French guillotine was of great symbolic importance in the new republic after the revolution, where it was introduced as a new, humane way of carrying out the death sentence.
According to Danish historian Inga Floto, who wrote The History of the Death Penalty in Culture (2001), the guillotine became a tool that showed "how the new regime's humane attitude towards the death penalty contrasts with the barbarity of the previous regime."
It is no coincidence that the guillotine appears as a formidable mechanism with a clear and simple geometry, from which rationality and efficiency emanate.
The guillotine was named after the physician JI Guillotin, who, after the French Revolution, became famous and praised for proposing reform of the punishment system, making the law equal for all and punishing criminals equally regardless of their status.
The severed head of Louis XVI, executed by guillotine / flickr.com, Karl-Ludwig Poggemann
In addition, Guillotin argued that the execution should be carried out in a humane way so that the victim experiences minimal pain, in contrast to the brutal practice of those times when the executioner with an ax or sword often had to deliver several blows before he was able to separate the head from the body.
When, in 1791, the French National Assembly, after a long debate about whether to abolish the death penalty altogether, instead decided that "the death penalty should be limited to the simple deprivation of life without any torture of the convict," Guillotin's ideas were taken up.
This led to the fact that the earlier forms of tools with "falling blades" were refined to the guillotine, which thus became a significant symbol of the new social order.
The guillotine was canceled in 1981
The guillotine remained the only execution instrument in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 (!). Public executions in France were abolished in 1939.
Latest executions in Denmark
In 1882, Anders Nielsen Sjællænder, a farm worker on Lolland Island, was sentenced to death for murder.
On November 22, 1882, the only executioner in the country, Jens Sejstrup, swung an ax.
The execution caused a great resonance in the press - especially due to the fact that Seistrup had to be struck with an ax several times before the head was separated from the body.
Anders Schellander was the last to be publicly executed in Denmark.
The next execution took place behind the closed doors of Horsens Prison. The death penalty in Denmark was abolished in 1933.
Soviet scientists transplanted dog heads
If you can endure some more horrifying and shuddering scientific experimentation, watch a video that shows Soviet experiments simulating the reverse: severed dogs' heads are kept alive by artificial blood supply.
The video was presented by the British biologist JBS Haldane, who said that he himself conducted several similar experiments.
There were doubts whether the video was propaganda exaggerating the achievements of Soviet scientists. Nevertheless, the fact that Russian scientists were pioneers in the field of organ transplantation, including transplanting the heads of dogs, is a generally accepted fact.
These experiences inspired the South African physician Christiaan Barnard, who is renowned worldwide for performing the world's first heart transplant.
Rasmus Kragh Jakobsen