I’m not necessarily afraid of death. I don’t think anything is waiting for us, so I have nothing to fear and nothing to look forward to … other than the pain and/or joy of dying. Once I don’t feel anything I’m good. Also, I’d like to know how long till someone has ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE if you’re holding their hand as they pass away. If it’s like going to sleep or passing out, that’s pretty darn quick. Consciousness is pretty demanding.
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Per original source: “Overall, this paper is an interesting contribution to the small field of necroneuroscience…,although the small sample size and the fact that all of these patients were severely ill, and on heavy sedative medications, makes it hard to know how far the findings will generalize.”
So more research (and ‘improvements’?) could provide something more meaningful. It would be interesting to see how control subjects are decided on; possibly a comatose subject not on medication and due to have the plug pulled?
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Maybe, but consider that the touching and holding is as much for the holder as the holdee, and they are still very much conscious, even if you no longer are.
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Timothy Leary sounded positively giddy about the prospect of getting to experience that.
“I’m looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying,” he said. […] “When your heart stops beating, there’s a period of 3 to 15 minutes while your brain is still alive,” he said. “It’s that period that’s never really been explored. Everybody has the same story of the near-death experience – my entire life flashed in front of me, the white light and all that – but no one really knows it.” (He pointed out, though, that anyone who takes LSD, or the anesthetic called ketamine, can come close to that experience.)
“I can’t wait for the moment when I’ll have the experience of being in my brain without my body being around,” he said.
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Brain activity. Something for Trump to look forward to further down the line… finally.
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Absolutely. The Norwegian existentialist Peter Wessel Zapffe once described suicide as ‘death by spiritual causes’.
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And probably not in a good way.
I could never figure out why people thought death to be instantaneous anyway. How could all parts of the body all decide to cease functioning at once?* Actually, I’m kind of surprised it’s only 10 minutes.
*without quantum entanglement, which I don’t believe is the case.
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Has that been used in a zombie movie yet?
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I’m an owl! Not a zombie connoisseur!
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Me neither! I’ve never seen a zombie movie. But I know they’re out there.
Now, owls I’ve seen. And I heard one in the middle of the night a few months ago too. Cool!
Once a bunch of us stared at an own sitting on the top of a boat (sorry, my nautical lingo is nil). It was motionless, waiting for prey. After about five minutes and a few pictures we realized it was fake, probably to scare away the seagulls. Duh.
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Owls are THE BEST!
(Interesting Factoid: Very few owl repellant decoys are afforded photo-ops.)
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I’m assuming that(as with most questions that start “Why don’t they just…”) there are a variety of good reasons that reflect my ignorance rather than theirs; but is there something especially hairy about the problem of using our knowledge of cellular metabolism to determine how long various sorts of cells can maintain operation without circulation, just with whatever oxygen and resources are available within the cell and from whatever blood stopped in the immediate vicinity?
I don’t doubt that it’d involve a bunch of rather fiddly flash-freezing and dissecting cells, prodding them for oxygen and ATP content, and the like; but knowledge about cellular respiration should give us some idea about where the potential energy is hiding, and what inputs are required, which would allow us to determine what sorts of reserves cells have and how fast they draw them down, through a mixture of depriving them of circulation and watching them die and directly inspecting them for chemicals of interest.
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It wasn’t actually a boat, either.
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Read the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant
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We thought that birds have the freedom to speculate wildly. Of course we could be wrong, we are just two turkeys in a meadow, after all. 
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Jeeesus everybody. This thread got dark, fast!
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I strongly suspect that it has to do with either explicitly denying; or not really being able to grok, the idea of ‘dying’ as something the body does, rather than the immaterial-thinking-thing neatly detaching from the pineal gland.
If you are considering the question of bodily shutdown, the only obvious way to coordinate involves vaporizing or pulverizing the person in question rather quickly. Potentially doable; but relatively rare.
If you are working on the position that ‘death’ is when the immaterial substance that has previously exerted an influence over the body by some sort of mechanism mumble mumble handwave ceasing to do so, the notion that it is a swift and binary state change leaps more readily to mind.
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It started that way I think!
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