John had been dead about four hours before his body was brought into the funeral home. He had been relatively healthy for most of his life.
He had worked his whole life on the Texas oil fields, a job that kept him physically active and in pretty good shape. He had stopped smoking decades earlier and drank alcohol moderately.
Then, one cold January morning, he suffered a massive heart attack at home apparently triggered by other, unknown, complications , fell to the floor, and died almost immediately. He was just A growing number of scientists view a rotting corpse as the cornerstone of a vast and complex ecosystem, which emerges soon after death and flourishes and evolves as decomposition proceeds.
Decomposition begins several minutes after death with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down.
This usually begins in the liver, which is rich in enzymes, and in the brain, which has high water content. Eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way.
Damaged blood cells begin to spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins, discolouring the skin. Body temperature also begins to drop, until it has acclimatised to its surroundings.
In life, muscle cells contract and relax due to the actions of two filamentous proteins actin and myosin , which slide along each other. After death, the cells are depleted of their energy source and the protein filaments become locked in place. This causes the muscles to become rigid and locks the joints.
Credit: Science Photo Library. During these early stages, the cadaveric ecosystem consists mostly of the bacteria that live in and on the living human body. By far the largest of these communities resides in the gut, which is home to trillions of bacteria of hundreds or perhaps thousands of different species. But we still know little about these microbial passengers while we are alive. We know even less about what happens to them when we die.
There are ethical issues [because] we need consent. Most internal organs are devoid of microbes when we are alive. Soon after death, however, the immune system stops working, leaving them to spread throughout the body freely. This usually begins in the gut, at the junction between the small and large intestines.
Left unchecked, our gut bacteria begin to digest the intestines — and then the surrounding tissues — from the inside out, using the chemical cocktail that leaks out of damaged cells as a food source. Then they invade the capillaries of the digestive system and lymph nodes, spreading first to the liver and spleen, then into the heart and brain. Bacteria convert the haemoglobin in blood into sulfhaemoglobin Credit: Science Photo Library. Javan and her team took samples of liver, spleen, brain, heart and blood from 11 cadavers, at between 20 and hours after death.
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How do studies of cardiac arrest inform the debate on the nature of consciousness? Traditionally, researchers had proposed that mind or consciousness — our self - is produced from organized brain activity.
However, nobody has ever been able to show how brain cells, which produce proteins, can generate something so different i. Interestingly, there has never been a plausible biological mechanism proposed to account for this.
Recently some researchers have started to raise the question that maybe your mind, your consciousness, your psyche, the thing that makes you, may not be produced by the brain. The brain might be acting more like an intermediary. It's not a brand new idea. They have argued that we have no evidence to show how brain cells or connections of brain cells could produce your thoughts, mind or consciousness.
The fact that people seem to have full consciousness, with lucid well-structured thought processes and memory formation from a time when their brains are highly dysfunctional or even nonfunctional is perplexing and paradoxical.
I do agree that this raises the possibility that the entity we call the mind or consciousness may not be produced by the brain. So, I believe it is possible for consciousness to be an as of yet undiscovered scientific entity that may not necessarily be produced by synaptic activity in the brain.
Support The World's Smartest Network. It could have been a dream, but I saw my own unconscious body, completely flatlined, in the ambulance. I remember the EMT who was in the ambulance with me whom I did not see before I passed out had mint green hair and I couldn't remember his name, but I asked for him when I regained consciousness about three days later.
It stretched up, down, left and right as far as I could see. Kind of like putting your eyes 6" from a fluorescent lightbulb. The next memory I have is waking up in the hospital.
There was a fog all around me, and I saw my best friend who at the time I'd been fighting with and he'd stopped talking to me come out of the mist. He told me that I couldn't go yet, that I have to keep trying , and if I promised not to give up, he'd see me back on Earth.
I wordlessly agreed, and I was instantly pushed into? No white lights, no dead relatives, nobody telling me to go back, but I was definitely able to see things that were in no way visible from where my body was.
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