Just a head Decapitation, reanimation, isolation, feral children, and the human head transplant

Caravaggio’s The Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist

Where is the soul?

• Could you cut it out? • We suspect that the seat of the will

power is the cingulate gyrus– Gyrus: a ridge on the brain– Where we differentiate “self” from

“other”.– Schizophrenics have problems with it

• Hear voices

– Lights up over issues of trust– Functions in attention– But where is the soul?

• Catholics: soul is in whole body

• F.Y.I. philosophically science is silent on non-material/ more than natural entities like the soul.

• Sometimes it’s a synonym for mind• Is neuroscience then relevant to

understanding the soul?– Crick argues for a materialistic

understanding of how the brain makes the mind

• Search Pubmed: ~500 articles have soul in title

Duncan MacDougall

• Weighed six people as they died & recorded change in mass– out of six tests, two discarded, one showed

immediate drop in weight, two showed immediate drop in weight which increased with the passage of time, and one showed an immediate drop in weight which reversed itself but later recurred.

– When was moment of death?

• First of his results 21 grams stuck • Also poisoned 15 dogs to prove they had no

soul• Science?

Cut off a head and ask it

• 10 or 12 seconds after blood supply is cut off the brain goes unconscious

• If you could communicate with the head during this time what would you learn?

Naomi Watts, also in 21

Dr. Joseph Guillotin

• Didn’t invent it, but lobbied to use it as more humane than noose

• Then people reported decapitated heads moved

• George Martin, assistant to official Executioner watched 120 beheadings and sided with instantaneous death.

• But the idea was there.

Hmm…

• Legaollois: “What if we inject blood into a decapitated brain?”

• 1884 Jean Baptiste Laborde started taking the heads and trying this.– Had a wagon all set up like a

laboratory– Fixed human heads to dog’s to

continue blood flow.– Muscles reacted, but too much

time had elapsed for any consciousness

Beaurieux• Did

experiments right on the scaffold,

• Notably a prisoner named Languille

• Twice Beaurieux called out his name and the head’s eyes opened and focused

Human head transplants?

• Anastomosis – stiching one blood vessel to another.

• Guthrie & Carrel early masters started stiching everything to everything else– Nobel prize stuff

• Early 1900’s stiched grafted a dog’s head onto another dog, lasted ~ 7 hours

1950’s Vladimir Demikhov

• Did about 20 puppy head transplants

• Have photos & lab notes• Reported lively puppy

heads• Immunology was the

obstacle now• Brain has a blood/brain

barrier that eliminates that obstacle

Now it gets strange

• 1960’s Robert White started transplanting dog & monkey brains into cavities.

• Kept brains alive for days on end

• No way to know what consciousness there was

• probably like an isolation chamber

Isolation chambers

• Though short periods of sensory deprivation can be relaxing, extended deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behavior

• Can use sensory overload: blast music

• Ganzfeld experiment: uses sensory deprivation to test for ESP

A prisoner at the United States Camp X-ray facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba being subjected to sensory deprivation, through the use of ear muffs, visor, breathing mask and heavy mittens.

Isolation Tanks

• Not as negative as sensory deprivation

• Used at spas• Water kept at body

temperature removes feeling of boundries

• Toward end of a one hour session theta waves detected in brain.– Waves occuring before

sleep and at waking– Useful for problem solving

or creative endevors.

What about social isolation?

throughout history ~100 reports of children growing up without other people around.

Fiction: Tarzan, Mowgli, Romulus/Remus

Reality: incredibly difficult to normalize to society

Kaspar Hauser: May 1828 kid walks into police station in Nuremburg, can write his name and the sentence “I want to be a rider like my father”

With great difficulty acclimated to society

Claimed he was raised in a cell on bread and water

Hooded man attempted to murder him and eventually succeeded. Mystery to this day.

But for the sake of all that is holy WHY?

• White suggests benefits to quadriplegics.– Usually have a shortened

life span– This might buy them a

decade of paralyzed life– Now the obstacle is

reattaching severed spinal cords

• Over the course of 8 hours in 1971 White did a full body transplant with monkeys

• They chewed and swallowed food

• Lasted up to 3 days, dying from rejection fevers or bleeding

Why it won’t happen

• Give a whole body to one person when 7 or 8 could benefit?

• Funding: Where’s the money?• Few patients would benefit• But some countries are interested.• Who would donate?

– Elderly men volunteered to be made into mummy ingredients in ancient Egypt

But what does all this say about us?

• How afraid of death are we?

• Afraid enough to build pyramids?