Pig Brains and Butterfly Goo

The strange science of life, death, and consciousness

The paper appeared in Nature, and the scientists were careful to say that only bits of the brains had come back online, not enough to equal consciousness. All the same, the findings were paradigm-shattering. It means, for one thing, we don’t die all at once.

Your brain — three pounds of gelatinous convolutions and a hundred billion nerves, invisible in its machinations but responsible for all we think, all we do, and all we are — is a greedy little organ. Thirty seconds without oxygenated blood, and you lose consciousness; one minute, and brain cells die; three minutes brings permanent brain damage; and after five, death is imminent.

Or so we’ve always assumed.

What the new study showed, by contrast, is that cell death is a “gradual, stepwise process.” Prof Nenad Sestan, a professor of neuroscience at Yale University, explained that we might have a longer time window after death than we previously thought — and some of those processes can even be “postponed, preserved or even reversed.”

Brain Time: Image credit/creation by Brandy Schillace