The strange phenomenon by which a severed head remains conscious (and what science says)

When Charlotte Corday, the murderer of French politician Jean-Paul Marat, was executed in the guillotine in 1793, a man named François Le Gros would have raised his head and slapped both cheeks.

Spectators said Corday's face was angry and her cheeks flushed.

Far from being an exception, there are different reports in the history of cut heads that seem to have shown signs of consciousness.

For example, apparently, the wife of King Henry XVIII of England, Ana Bolena, tried to speak after being decapitated.

But are these stories false or is there scientific evidence that the head can remain conscious after being separated from the body?

In recent years, the project to achieve the so-called first human head transplant in the world has attracted keen interest.

If it were done, which seems less and less likely, transplantation would push back the many limits of science.

The most obvious is whether the head (and its contents) can survive after being removed from the body and for how long.

The brain and all the structures that depend on it need oxygen to function (the brain consumes 20% of all the oxygen used in the body).

Once the blood vessels in the neck are cut off, the oxygen supply stops.

Regardless of the amount of oxygen available in the blood and tissues after the fatal blow, it will surely be there to be used, but it will not last long.

Therefore, tissues or structures still attached to the head, such as the muscles to open and close the eyes or mouth, may be able to move because the nerves that feed these muscles would still be connected to the source. oxygen.

The heads of other animals can survive much longer.

In 2014, for example, it was reported that a chef in China had died after being bitten by a venomous snake that had sliced ​​off his head 20 minutes earlier.

For some time now, this area of ​​research has focused on finding out what people experiencing near-death experiences know about this episode.

There are people who have suffered a heart attack and can describe what was happening at that time and the room around them during their resuscitation.

This suggests that if it is possible that your heart is not beating, your brain is certainly aware of what is happening around it, even though it does not present any of the clinical signs of consciousness.

Other studies have recorded the presence of activity in the brain 30 minutes after the heart has stopped beating.

These are called delta brain waves, which are also often seen in the stages of sleep and relaxation.

Recent research has even shown that these post-death waves end in a last wave of activity that crosses the brain a few minutes after the end of the heartbeat, called propagated depolarization.

In humans, these waves are large enough to be detected by an electroencephalogram, a device that measures electrical activity in the brain.

Studies of other organisms have suggested that even 48 to 96 hours after death, the genes are still expressed and that there is activity, and that in some cases their quantity even increases.

It is necessary to study further and better understand human beings in order to actually establish what is this activity detected after death and how it is related to the function and activity conscious against the 39; unconscious.

It is likely that the most famous case of survival after decapitation is Mike's.

Mike survived 18 months after being beheaded. "How?", You might ask.

Well, it seems that the so-called fatal cut managed to cross his brainstem at a certain angle that kept alive the parts of his central nervous system that control the basic functions. In turn, a timely and well-placed blood clot prevented him from bleeding to death.

Did I mention that Mike was a chicken? Well, it's probably the oldest example of a "hen running without a head".

Unfortunately, this will never be a possibility for humans. Even the parts of the brain that control the most primitive functions are contained in the skull.

So, as much as people want to believe that Ana Bolena tried to speak after being beheaded, the story is probably apocryphal.

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