There is something very unnerving about seeing a living creature without a head. But, in 1940s America, people could not get enough of it. Miracle Mike, the headless chicken, was a national sensation and toured the country for 18 months until he choked on his own mucus in 1947.
A similar headless wonder chicken was reported in Thailand in 2018, and in 2021 a chef was bitten by the head of a disembodied snake. The question is, could a human carry out such a death-defying feat?
Throughout history, beheading has been seen as one of the most foolproof forms of execution. During the French Revolution, only one of the 10,000 people who went under the guillotine received an "imperfect" execution, according to John Wilson Croker in his book of essays on the early period of the French Revolution.
But foolproof or not, numerous historical reports have described apparent signs of life coming from these disembodied heads. For example, the second wife of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, supposedly tried to speak after her head had been chopped off. In 1905, physician Dr. Gabriel Beaurieux studied the disembodied head of a criminal called Henri Languille and reported the eyes of the corpse snapped open and twitched.
"Death itself is not very well defined," neuroscientist Ajmal Zemmar, from the University of Louisville, told Newsweek. "We always think of 'time of death' as the moment when the heart stops beating—in Hollywood movies, we hear this flickering sound of the heart wave, and when that goes flat it means that person is dead. But is this really true?"
In a study published in February 2022, Zemmar and his colleagues recorded the activity of a dying brain before and after this point of clinical death. "Thirty seconds after the heart stopped beating, the brain waves kept going," he said. "That leaves the question 'when do we really die?'".
Similar experiments have been performed in monkeys, which exhibit brain activity for up to two hours after the heart has stopped.
But is this brain activity really indicative of consciousness?
"We can't ask a dead person, so the only way we can look into this activity is by recording their brain," Zemmar said. "We can then correlate this activity with the experiences of people who have survived near death experiences...Interestingly, what these people tell us is consistently the same thing: that they had a recall of life."
When a healthy human sees photos of key life moments—things like the first day of school or the birth of a child—they exhibit distinct brain wave patterns. Wave forms known as gamma oscillations are consistently seen within this activity.
A study done in 2013 showed similar wave patterns in the brains of rats for 30 seconds after they had had an induced heart attack. But until this year, we did not know whether this data was applicable to humans.
"For the first time, we recorded the activity of the human brain at the time of death," Zemmar said. "We saw all these exact same gamma waves that they saw in the rats and in humans when they have memory recall. We don't know for sure because we can't ask the patient, but it is intriguing to speculate that these gamma waves that we recorded might represent a recall of life."
With this data in mind, it would appear that life continues, for at least a short time, after the heart has stopped beating. "If you stopped the heart function for a certain time, you wouldn't necessarily be dead," Zemmar said. "If you were able to replenish the blood supply to the brain, you would come back.
"You can put in a new heart and the human keeps on living. You could do this with the liver, with the kidney, with everything. But you cannot do that with the brain. It's the only one that you can not replace."
As a result, many clinicians have chosen to redefine death as the point when activity stops in the brain as opposed to the heart.
Chopping off a person's head would, therefore, appear to be the most rapid method for extinguishing consciousness.
When the head is separated from the body, there will be a sudden drop in blood pressure and thus a sudden lack of oxygen and energy needed to power activity in the brain. In 2011, scientists in the Netherlands conducted a study using an EEG scanner on decapitated rats and, within three to four seconds of decapitation, "conscious" brain activity had ceased.
So what could have caused the twitching grimaces of history's most famous disembodied heads?
"If you cut off the head, you would have this unregulated over-firing of nerve cells that would be similar to a seizure," Zemmar said. "So you just have this overactivity of the nerve cells and they will continue to fire until they die."
However, this does not explain how Miracle Mike was able to survive for 18 months without his head. "The control of heart rate and blood pressure is all sitting in the brain stem," Zemmar said. "If you cut off or damage the brain stem, you will lose those. But, if for whatever reason, the brainstem was kept alive, you may be able to somehow keep those functions going."
When Mike's head was cut off, the back of his brain and the jugular vein were left intact. A well-timed blood clot stopped the chicken from bleeding to death and there was just enough brain left for essential functions like breathing and heart rate. Obviously he could not feed himself, but his owners kept him alive by feeding him with an eyedropper through the stump of his neck.
In chickens, the brain is largely concentrated towards the back of the skull, where the head goes into the neck. But in humans, the architecture of the brain is very different. "I can guarantee you that no human, no matter how you did it, would be surviving for 18 months after the brain was cut off," Zemmar said. "It's impossible."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
");jQuery(this).remove()}) jQuery('.start-slider').owlCarousel({loop:!1,margin:10,nav:!0,items:1}).on('changed.owl.carousel',function(event){var currentItem=event.item.index;var totalItems=event.item.count;if(currentItem===0){jQuery('.owl-prev').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-prev').removeClass('disabled')} if(currentItem===totalItems-1){jQuery('.owl-next').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-next').removeClass('disabled')}})}})})
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrK6enZtjsLC5jqecsKunmrKsecKopGagn6x6rbvNoGSsraKrtrexjLCgraCfqsFutMSam2ZpZ2qCeX2S