“Death was Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.”
Terry Pratchett,
The New Scientist hosts a page completely concerned with the subject of death. The latest grisly news piece is How does it feel to die? They ask “is it distressing to experience consciousness slipping away or something people can accept with equanimity?”
They cover a host of ways to die: drowning (sounds awful: grasping for breathe, burning sensation as water hits the airway, but there are reports of calmness and tranquility at the end), Heart attacks, bleeding to death, fire (very painful or choking), electrocution (instantaneous loss of consciousness may occur), falls (survivors, even suicide victims, describe a reaction of struggling to land the right way up), hanging (not good if you don’t get a rapid hangman’s fracture), lethal injection (not always immediately lethal), and even explosive decompression (no thanks). The guillotine appears to be the least painful way to go, with the oxygen contained within the head lost within 7 seconds.
None of us can know the answers for sure until our own time comes, but the few individuals who have their brush with death interrupted by a last-minute reprieve can offer some intriguing insights. Advances in medical science, too, have led to a better understanding of what goes on as the body gives up the ghost.
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de gr̢ce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain Рthe modern definition of biological death.
If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about 10 seconds before losing consciousness.
2 Comments
Reminds me of that old bit of graffiti:
THE FIRST 30 MINUTES OF LIFE ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS.
(The last 30 can be pretty hairy too.)
I suppose it is a blessing that neither the transition from nothingness or the transition to nothingness is something you remember. A quite comforting thought.
However, I do worry that instead of spending the last 10 seconds of calm brain activity recalling something intensely beautiful, there is the potential danger of having a few bars of the Birdy Song relentless hammering on your dying neurons. That would be pretty damn annoying.