Human brain could stay conscious 'hours after death'

New research in the US has suggested the body's major functions experience a more steady decline after death

Data has revealed that some people may be alert to their surroundings despite being declared biologically dead, long after the heart has stopped pumping blood.

According to scientists, the body shows that biological and neural functions "steadily decline from minutes to hours," rather than "ceasing abruptly."

Researcher Anna Fowler came up with the findings suggested the decrease of brain activity lasts hours, rather than seconds as previously believed.

Writing in her study, she added: "Consciousness may not vanish the moment the brain falls silent. Cells may not die the moment the heart stops.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/brain-conscious-hours-after-death-5HjdSPt_2/

Edited 23 hours ago23 hr by Moon99

Can't find the original paper or the data it contained. There's lots of "may" in this report, but I don't see how the dots are being connected to leap from random neural firings to consciousness. This needs the cited study. And there's a larger body of research showing synaptic connections (the connectome) breaking up within a few minutes, so Fowler needs to show how countering forces could keep the connectome intact. Cellular autolysis and ion deregulation would seem to make any continued functional neural activity quite difficult.

7 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Can't find the original paper or the data it contained. There's lots of "may" in this report, but I don't see how the dots are being connected to leap from random neural firings to consciousness. This needs the cited study. And there's a larger body of research showing synaptic connections (the connectome) breaking up within a few minutes, so Fowler needs to show how countering forces could keep the connectome intact. Cellular autolysis and ion deregulation would seem to make any continued functional neural activity quite difficult.

Yes I could find no reference to any paper by Fowler to support any of this. Hallucinated by AI and mindlessly copied by bad lazy news organisations perhaps.

Standard First Aid training teaches that the brain can survive ( in various states ) up to 4 minutes without oxygenated blood flow.
Any longer, without re-setting the heart with a defibrillator, or manually pumping with CPR, is usually useless.

“Speaking at a science conference in Arizona”

It’s curious that it’s not named.

…

It was at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Phoenix, Arizona, according to other reports.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Can't find the original paper or the data it contained.

There might not yet be a published paper; we presented new/ongoing results at conferences all the time.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

Standard First Aid training teaches that the brain can survive ( in various states ) up to 4 minutes without oxygenated blood flow.
Any longer, without re-setting the heart with a defibrillator, or manually pumping with CPR, is usually useless.

Apparently she looked at near-death experience reports, so people were technically dead but then revived, so I’m not sure that this is exactly a revelation We harvest organs after death, obviously, and they’re still viable

for a period of time

I can't find anything on this either, plenty of press reports but nothing in what would perhaps be a science journal etc.

20 hours ago, swansont said:

There might not yet be a published paper; we presented new/ongoing results at conferences all the time.

Yep, I had checked to see if there were conference proceedings, but those won't be out for a while as it's only been four days since it ended. I was hoping Fowler might have something on a preprint server like bioRxiv, but nothing like that so far. I'm having trouble finding a detailed AAAS conference schedule which mentions an Anna Fowler. She's listed as a grad student at ASU, but the pop science coverage only makes reference to her doing an analysis of more than 20 studies on people’s near-death experiences, as well as studies conducted in animals peri- and postmortem. So she did a systematic review with some meta-analysis and not actual lab or clinical research.

I notice media bottomfeeders like The Telegraph included some of Ms Fowler's more outrageous claims, e.g. (regarding prompt organ harvesting) "This is done to ensure the organs are fresh and not damaged for their transplantation into a patient in need, but Ms Fowler says that in these cases a donor may still be conscious while their organs are harvested."

I can see why she drew a cluster of reporters with such horror movie speculations. Rather irresponsible - that kind of thing gets amplified in the echo chambers of the Web and you could get people changing their organ donor status.