Buzz
As Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi highlights in an article for Discover, in 1536, witnesses to Anne Boleyn’s beheading claimed that her severed head’s lips seemed to move, leading some to speculate that she might have been trying to speak. Similarly, when Charlotte Corday, who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, was guillotined in 1793, her executioner reportedly slapped her decapitated head, and onlookers said her ‘face flushed,’ as if reacting to the ‘insult.’ Could Corday, like Boleyn, have briefly survived after death?
These chilling notions may have influenced a wave of horror films where scientists tried to keep dead brains alive using methods like brain transplantation in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), immersion in a chemical solution in The Brain (1962), and a mysterious reanimating agent in Re-Animator (1985). Some of these movies even introduced telepathy as a curious side-effect.
The ten scientists on this list achieved what was once deemed the stuff of fiction or wild theory: they managed to keep brains alive after the body’s death, even if only for a brief period.
10. Charles-Édouard Brown-Sequard
Describing Charles-Édouard Brown-Sequard (1817–1894) as merely unusual would be an understatement. He was a brilliant scientist whose sometimes eccentric experiments deepened the understanding of physiological mechanisms.
There are conflicting reports about the results of an 1857 experiment in which he introduced fibrin-free, oxygen-rich blood into the arteries of a decapitated dog’s head, supposedly reversing rigor mortis. While some doubt the claim, Alex Boese seems convinced that this process, called perfusion, brought the head back to life, as it exhibited visible ‘voluntary movements in the eyes and face’ and ‘tremors of anguish’ until it died again moments later.
9. Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde
Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde (1830–1903) demonstrated that Brown-Sequard’s technique could also be applied to humans who had been executed by guillotine. As noted on the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology’s SciTales website, Laborde, through bribery, obtained the head of a recently decapitated criminal. He then perfused the left side of the head’s blood vessels with ‘oxygenated cow blood,’ while suturing the right side with blood vessels from a dog. The result: the criminal's head became animated, with its facial muscles tightening, its tongue appearing to ‘boil,’ and its jaw snapping shut.
The question of whether such animation indicated that a decapitated head remained conscious for a brief period after being severed remained a topic of debate. However, French doctor Gabriel Beaurieux was convinced that consciousness did persist for up to four seconds following decapitation in both humans and dogs. As Matthew D. Turner recounts, after calling out the name of a guillotined man, Beaurieux saw the man’s ‘eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contraction,’ meeting his gaze and ‘focusing on him.’ The physician was certain that ‘living eyes were looking at me.’
8. Corneille Heymans
The Nobel Prize website’s ‘facts’ about 1939 laureate Corneille Heymans (1892–1968) mention his ‘discovery of the role played by the sinus and aortic mechanisms in the regulation of respiration,’ though it stops short of elaborating on the specifics of his work, which many would deem inhumane.
As described by Walter F. Boron and Emile L. Boulpaep in their book Medical Physiology, Heymans performed a peculiar experiment in which he surgically connected a decapitated dog’s head to a live dog, allowing them to share a common circulatory system. The living dog provided blood to the severed head. This unusual procedure allowed Heymans to demonstrate that a feedback loop, independent of ‘blood-borne chemicals,’ controlled the vagus nerve’s regulation of ‘upward and downward [reflex arc] traffic.’
7. Vladimir Demikhov
According to Time Magazine, a sensational exhibit during a Moscow Surgical Society meeting showcased a bizarre creation by Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov: ‘a large white dog, wagging its tail.’ The dog appeared to be in a strange state of conflict, as ‘from one side of its neck protruded the head of a small brown puppy.’ As onlookers watched, the puppy’s head bit the white dog’s ear, and the white dog snarled in response.
The article explains that Demikhov (1916–1998) had a great deal of experience preparing for his remarkable surgical feats. He began by ‘replacing the hearts of dogs with artificial pumps,’ then progressed to implanting ‘a second heart in a dog’s chest,’ after removing part of one of the dog’s lungs to make room for the additional organ. Demikhov repeated this procedure multiple times, eventually succeeding in extending the life of his canine patient for two and a half months, with the second heart taking over when the first one stopped functioning.
Demikhov’s next breakthrough involved reversing the procedure, ‘grafting the head and forelegs of a small puppy’ onto a full-grown dog. This caused confusion in the adult dog, which attempted to shake off the attached partial puppy. ‘The puppy’s head kept its own personality’ and retained its playful nature, while the adult dog eventually accepted its unusual companion for the six days they lived together.
Demikhov clarified the purpose behind his creation of the hybrid animal, stating that the experiment ‘was a long-range attempt to learn how damaged organs can be replaced, or how their functions can be performed by mechanical substitutes.’
6. Robert J. White
Neurosurgeon Robert J. White (1926-2010) carried out a controversial procedure where he severed the head of one monkey to transplant the head of another monkey onto its decapitated body. His cutting-edge surgery received both praise and criticism. According to an article by Kelly Engebretson from the University of St. Thomas, the procedure was part of research on how a body can accept a new brain, with White’s first monkey (out of about 30) living for eight days. After regaining consciousness, it could smell, hear, see, and even bite at one of White’s colleagues, but was unable to move its new body.
White’s surgical techniques included pioneering the method of lowering a body’s temperature to protect the brain and central nervous system during surgery. He also utilized the ‘extracorporeal perfusion system,’ similar to the technique Heymans introduced. However, White’s operation involved connecting only the brain of one dog to the ‘blood vessels in the neck of another’ before stitching the excised brain of the deceased dog inside a synthetic skin sac.
5. Rudolfo Llinás
In a 1993 article published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, researchers described how a scientist successfully isolated the brain of an adult guinea pig outside its body and immersed it in a solution that kept the organ alive for eight hours. When electrical stimulation was applied to the optic nerve or other related nerve fibers, the brain exhibited transient nerve-generated electrical signals that were similar to those seen in fully living animals. The study concluded that this procedure could be used to study the ‘multisynaptic circuits’ of mammalian brains.
4. Anton Coenen
In his study, Anton Coenen, co-author of ‘Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death,’ examined rats—some conscious, some anesthetized—who were guillotined in an attempt to answer the grim question of whether decapitation could be considered a humane method of euthanasia in awake animals. The results were measured through electroencephalograms (EEGs), which recorded brain activity during the procedure.
Though the findings were somewhat inconclusive, the researchers concluded that consciousness seemed to disappear within three to four seconds following decapitation. This led them to suggest that ‘decapitation is a quick and not an inhumane method of euthanasia,’ even though the rats didn’t fully die until nearly a minute later.
The moment of death in the rats was estimated based on an unexpected finding in the experiment: approximately one minute after decapitation, each rat’s EEG showed a large wave, which was interpreted as marking ‘the ultimate border between life and death.’ The researchers theorized that this wave represented ‘the synchronous death of brain neurons, expressed as a ‘wave of death.’
The researchers' suggestion that their findings may have implications for the timing of organ donation seems to indicate they believe their results from the rat experiments could also be applicable to human experiences of death.
3. University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
The study conducted by Pascual and his team led to the development of a device capable of isolating blood flow to the brain, enabling the organ to survive and function separately from the body for several hours. This device holds potential for improving cardiopulmonary machines by replicating ‘natural blood flow to the brain.’ Pascual notes, ‘This new approach allows research that focuses on the brain independently of the body,’ a feat that would otherwise be impossible.
By using the device to separate the brain from the rest of the body, Pascual and his team have already utilized this system to explore the effects of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) in the absence of other variables that would typically arise from metabolic changes due to food intake restrictions or insulin administration, both of which influence brain metabolism.
2. Juan M. Pascual
According to a Scientific Reports article, Professor Juan M. Pascual, Ph.D., of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and his team sedated pigs to study the ‘neurophysiological mechanisms’ in their brains, focusing on synaptic function within the pigs' cortices, which share similarities with those of human brains. After the experiment, the pigs were euthanized, and a necropsy was performed to confirm electrode placement and assess brain structure and integrity.
The researchers concluded that, aside from a ‘small segment of alpha electrical activity associated with vision in conscious persons,’ the pigs’ EEG recordings were nearly identical to those of awake humans, suggesting that the brain activity observed in pigs might not be vastly different from that in human brains.
1. Nenad Sestan
In the experiments led by Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and his team, pigs were chosen as subjects. Rather than decapitating the animals themselves, they sourced between one and two hundred severed pig heads from a slaughterhouse. The researchers then attempted to restore circulation to these heads using a system of pumps, heaters, and artificial blood bags heated to body temperature, as detailed in an MIT Technology Review article.
While there was no evidence suggesting that the decapitated pig brains regained consciousness, the researchers made an astonishing discovery: ‘billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity,’ leading Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute, to assert that the brains remained alive.
Sestan explained that if a person were to wake up with their brain ‘reanimated outside the body,’ they would experience ‘the ultimate sensory deprivation chamber,’ existing without ears, eyes, or any means to communicate.
