Things that Yoram knows: Is it possible to live without a head?

Liat wonders if animals really continue to function without a head?

Depends on which animal. The more primitive the nervous system of the animal, activities can be carried out without instructions "from above" and continue even when the unfortunate animal loses its head.
Insects, for example, have a brain, but the nervous system is more distributed and clusters of nerve cells (ganglions) in different parts of the body take on roles that for us are concentrated in the head. Leg movements, for example, do not need instruction from nerve cells in the insect's head. Blown flies continue to move for a long time and large insects such as cockroaches (cockroaches) and grasshoppers not only continue to live for a long time (days and even weeks) without a head but are even able to learn new behaviors during this period. In a particularly sadistic experiment, researcher G. Horridge placed headless insects in a device where they received an electric shock when their legs dropped below a fixed position. The insects not only learned to lift their legs while in the facility but also remembered the lesson and hurried to lift their legs when they were returned to the torture facility after a rest period.

Amphibious fish and reptiles are "cold-blooded" and therefore the food and oxygen consumption of the brain is low, as a result, a decapitated head of these animals is able to function for up to an hour without a supply of fresh blood. Severed heads of snakes and lizards have been observed as they try to bite those who approach them, smell the air with their tongues, focus their gaze on moving objects, the pupils react to light, they blink as usual and show clear signs of suffering and distress. If the head splash leaves some of the neck vertebrae attached the poor reptile will try to move and escape. Guidelines for the euthanasia of these animals in laboratories emphasize, therefore, that spraying the head alone is not a humane method of death, and it is also necessary to thoroughly crush the skull.

In warm-blooded animals, birds and mammals, the brain is a large consumer of energy and its function ceases seconds after the cessation of blood supply to it. What can still continue to function is the body.

Mike's story

On September 1945, 5, the head of "Mike" the rooster, who was then 18 months old, was beheaded by his owner, Lloyd Olsen. Roosters run around for a few minutes after the traumatic event and then enter the calm state characteristic of being rescued. Headless Mike continued to show activity for a much longer time. When he showed no signs of fatigue the next day either, Mr. Olsen decided to see how long Mike would insist on ignoring his absence. He fed and watered Mike by dripping food and water directly into the esophagus and the young rooster not only did not die but even gained weight. He walked, croaked, steadied himself on the steps of the ladder and even tried to arrange his feathers on his headless neck. Chickens around him treated him as a full-fledged member of the flock, although Mike himself (probably due to the blindness and deafness accompanying his special condition) ignored them. The man continued to live for another 1947 months until he died of suffocation due to inhalation of secretions into the trachea (without a head, it turns out, it is impossible to cough) in March XNUMX.
how is it possible? Most of the chicken's reflexes are controlled by the brainstem which is autonomous, a thorough examination by Mike revealed that the covering was not perfect: a significant part of the brainstem remained close to the spinal cord and was not splashed with the rest of the head. A blood clot blocked the jugular vein and prevented massive bleeding. 6 weeks after the failed slaughter, Mike became a celebrity: he starred in LIFE magazine and went on tour: enough people paid 25 cents to watch him to make the proud owner $4500 a month. A calculation in terms of purchasing power (taking into account inflation in the last 70 years) leads to the conclusion that it is better to be a careless butcher than a skilled hi-tech man. Mike's city Fruita in Florida took advantage of the publicity to promote tourism and declared May 17th as "Headless Mike Day" celebrated there every year at a poultry festival.

And what about us?

Beheading was a popular way of execution for thousands of years, this is how David chose to kill Goliath and the method is one of the 4 Beit Din deaths mentioned in the Talmud. Today, only our Saudi neighbors maintain the tradition of beheading criminals with a sword. The kingdom was even reprimanded by the UN Human Rights Council for a mass beheading during which no fewer than 37 condemned men were beheaded in April 2019. Many myths have been linked to the reactions of the severed head immediately after it was separated from the neck and most of them are related to the guillotine which allowed an enraptured audience to watch heads being severed and bodies fluttering immediately after execution the law There is no reference to the horror stories from the French Revolution about heads reacting to the crowd when they were displayed by the executioner. The story about the chemist Antoine Lavoisier blinking his eyes after the execution at the request of his friends is baseless and like it the myth about the severed head of Charlotte Corday (the famous assassin in the life of Mara) spat on the executioner after it slapped him after being taken out of the basket. In the 19th century, cases were recorded in which death row prisoners were asked and agreed to blink after the execution but without success (it is possible that the scientific motivation is not at its peak in those last seconds of consciousness). Even so, eyewitnesses to head splashing in an accident report the focus of the gaze on the severed body and the faces of those around them and facial expressions (a look of surprise alternating with suffering or sadness). Theoretically, the human brain should maintain a state of consciousness for about 10 seconds after severing the blood vessels - a sufficient amount of time to understand the new dismal situation.

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More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Things that birds know: why do pigeons bob their heads?
• The world's first non-breathing animal was discovered
• Breathing air improves brain performance