Dead From the Neck Up

Sorry I missed you last night. I was running a bit early, and it appears that you were running a bit late.

I think that when somebody is brain dead they have to hook him up to a machine to keep his heart and lungs functioning. Then, at some point, a decision is made to "pull the plug" because they figure that he's never going to come back. If they want to harvest any organs for transplant, they have to keep the machine running until the organs are out. I understand that they anesthetize him during this process to prevent reflexive muscle spasms that might disrupt their work. This must make it kind of spooky. The guy is legally dead, but his body is still warm and capable of involuntary movement.

In his book "Consciousness Beyond Life - The Science of the Near-Death Experience", Dr. Pim van Lommel expresses the opinion that there should be more research done about the difference between life and death. He did some research himself into the near-death experiences reported by some people who have been brought back from cardiac arrest. While he was working as a cardiac specialist in a Dutch hospital, he and his staff interviewed all the people who had been brought back like that in his hospital over an extensive period of time. The study itself seemed to be scientifically valid, but I think some of the conclusions he came to were a bit of a stretch. One problem is that only about 18% of the subjects reported having the experience, the others claimed to have no memory of the time they were out. Another problem is that all the reporting survivors told of a moment when they turned back, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and rejoined the land of the living. Most of them expressed the belief that, if they hadn't turned back when they did, they would have crossed the line of no return. I would like to talk to somebody who has actually crossed that line and came back to tell about it, but I don't think anybody has done that yet, except maybe Jesus, and I don't have His email address. In all the cases, the survivors were only gone for a few minutes, although many of them said that they had no sense of time during the experience. My takeaway was the study proved that, at least in some cases, human consciousness appears to survive clinical death by at least a few minutes. Dr. Lommel extrapolates from there into some speculative conclusions which, as I said, seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.

In reading about that volcano that recently blew it's top in Japan, I came across the fact that, under Japanese law, an M.D. is the only one who can  pronounce someone legally dead. Japanese citizens, therefore, are forbidden to report that the bodies they have recovered from the mountain are dead. What they say instead is that they found them "in a state of cardiac arrest". This doesn't mean that they died from a heart attack, or that they are indeed dead at all, it just means that they couldn't detect any vital signs.

When we went to school, the experts weren't sure if things like bacteria and yeast were plants or animals. Since then, they have reorganized the classification system and put them in a class of their own. It is doubtful that things like that are capable of emotion, but we don't know that for an absolute fact. There has been work done with plants that suggests they can communicate with each other, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are conscious. It appears that a plant under stress exudes certain chemicals,  which can elicit a response from other plants. Last I heard, that was all they had.