What Happens After Decapitation? Experts Explain How Long Humans Can Live Without A Head

Decapitation happens when the head is separated from the body of a person or animal. In medieval times, beheading people has been one of the punishments for people who committed a crime. For example, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard were ordered to be beheaded by their husband King Henry VIII for different reasons. Other people were also victims of beheading as a form of execution.

Similarly, a chicken in the 1940s in America became headless and was famously called Miracle Mike for surviving 18 months even without its head. The national sensation toured the country but eventually died in 1947 after choking from his own mucus.

Checking for Brain Activity

Miracle Mike is not the only headless animal that remained alive even after being decapitated. A similar headless chicken was also reported in 2018 in Thailand, and a chef was reported bitten by the head of a disembodied snake in 2021. But the question is, could a human carry out such a death-defying feat?

There have been historical numerous reports that described apparent signs of life from decapitated bodies. For instance, Anne Boleyn supposedly tried to speak after her head had been chopped off and a criminal's head in 1905 is said to snap open and twitched his eyes even after being dead.

Ajmal Zemmar, a neuroscientist from the University of Louisville, told Newsweek that death itself is not well defined as it is often thought of as the moment when the heart stops beating as shown in movies when the flickering sound of the heart wave stops.

In a 2022 study, titled "Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain" published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, Zemmar, and his colleagues recorded the activity of a dying brain before it is considered clinically dead. He said that the brain waves went on even 30 seconds after the heart stopped beating.

Similar experiments on monkeys also showed that they functioned still even after two hours the heart stopped beating. To know whether it indicates consciousness, they asked people who experienced near-death experiences. The majority of them have the same answer of having a recall of life.

They conclude that life still continues for a short time after the heart stopped beating, and if the heart skipped a beat does not necessarily mean that the person is automatically dead. Replenishing the blood supply to the brain will bring them back alive.

How Did Miracle Mike Survived?

On 10 September 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were slaughtering chickens on their farm in Fruita, Colorado when they found one was still alive, up and walking around. Their great-grandson, Troy Waters, told BBC News that his great-grandparents placed the headless chicken in an old apple box and saw the next day that it was still alive. So, what happened?

Beheading disconnects the head from the body, but the spinal cord circuits may still have residual energy for a short period. Without input from the brain, Dr. Tom Smulders of Newcastle University explained that brain circuits could start spontaneously in which neurons become active and legs start moving. But they do not usually last for 18 months, much more than 15 minutes.

Mike was fed with liquid food and water dropped directly to his esophagus using a syringe. Experts are also amazed that Miracle Mike did not die from blood loss and continued functioning without a head. In humans, it would involve total loss of the brain but it seems different in chickens.

Reports suggest that 80% of Mike's brain which controls his heart rate, breathing, hunger, and digestion remained untouched after his head was cut-off.

It was suggested that a part of the brain stem remained attached to his body, which enabled the chicken to live longer. Mike's case is truly unique and may have been a product of being cut at the right time when a blood clot luckily prevented blood loss.

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