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 Tuesday at 10:46 PM2 days 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.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

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.

One site I scanned said it was part of her thesis, so it might be a while.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

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.

Like I said, organ viability after death is known, so I’m not sure how controversial that aspect is. The assertion about consciousness probably is, but a conference talk isn’t evidence. I don’t know how you could test this - there’s a fairly short time limit to reviving people after blood and oxygen to the brain are cut off. I wonder what the Q&A was like for the talk.

I have heard of cases where young kids fall through the ice of frozen lakes, and are pulled out as long as 15 min later, that have survived ( this is cold Canada; it happens more often than you'd think ).
This probably has to do with the 'malleability' of young brains, and the effects of the cold temperatures.
But I wouldn't say they were conscious during those submerged 15 min.

When circulatory collapse occurs, cells throughout the body switch from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism. If hypoxia persists, ATP depletion and cellular damage develop. Reintroduction of oxygen may trigger reperfusion injury through the generation of reactive oxygen species. Some cells undergo apoptosis. To prevent irreversible cell loss, apoptosis and other cell death pathways would need to be inhibited - although these processes are activated for specific physiological reasons.

1) Unwanted or harmful molecules must be removed prior to the reintroduction of oxygen. 2) DNA that may have been damaged within the cells must be repaired (the body contains sufficient genetic information to reconstruct a correct version). 3) The cells must be “revived” gradually, so that they do not undergo apoptosis.

The adult woman, Anna Bågenholm, was not breathing and her heart had stopped beating for over 2,5 hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm