“..When Are You Dead? .. Science Just Made the Work of Religion a Bit More Difficult..”
“.. A recent study of brain activity in those thought to be in a “vegetative” state blurs the line between life and death.
When are you dead?
This is a tricky question, where science and religion often hide, or collide.
It’s answered in a diversity of ways by different cultures at different times, by different physicians in different hospitals, different shamans in different tribes.
Is it when your heart stops working (as in Japan and Shintoism)?
When your soul leaves your body (as in Tibet and Buddhism)?
When your brain stops working?
When a certain part of your brain stops working?
Who decides when you’re dead?
Can you be dead in body, but not in mind?
Vice versa?
Cogito ergo sum?
A new study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine adds intriguing neuroscientific fuel to the fires already ablaze around these questions.
Typically, when a severely head-injured patient is checked for consciousness soon after his or her accident, the physician might look for the ability to track a moving item with the eyes or say “lift a finger if you can hear me,” and then if answered in the affirmative, maybe “lift two fingers for yes, one for no.”
At some point over time, if there’s no response and apparent unconsciousness continues, the patient is considered to be in a ‘persistent vegetative state.’
Doesn’t sound too good, nobody’s happy.
What to do?
Challenging enough question.
But, now along comes Martin Monti and his colleagues in Belgium.
They add a new test for consciousness, applied to fifty-plus folks in a proclaimed vegetative state.
Monti et al., using an MRI machine (which monitors for active neurons in the brain), watch these folks’ brains when they are asked a question.
And, amazingly a handful of the patients’ brains light up ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ just like your brain or mine would if we were asked a question.
These folks are thinking—they are responding to a specific question.
They are not vegetables after all!
Or at least I don’t think so..”
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