Living heads
One of the first documentary evidence of the life of a severed head can perhaps be considered an incident that occurred in 1793 in France, where at that time the guillotine began to be widely used for executions. After the head of Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Jacobin Jean Paul Marat, fell into the basket, the executioner took her by the hair and, mockingly, gave her several slaps. According to eyewitnesses, the face of the executed woman showed obvious indignation at what was happening. And there are many similar testimonies of witnesses described in historical literature. However, in addition to the unfounded statements of eyewitnesses, there are many experiments carried out by real scientists. So in February 1803, the young Polish doctor Wendt, having received the head of one of the convicts for experiments, discovered that in the process of irritating the exposed part of the spinal cord, a pained expression appeared on the face of the executed person. In addition, the head covered the eyelids if Wendt pretended to poke his fingers into his eyes. The head directed its gaze towards the one who called it by name, and moved its lips as if trying to say something. The scientist recorded that the head responded to all manipulations within 2 minutes and 40 seconds after cutting off. 100 years later, in 1905, the French doctor Borje performed a similar experiment with a convict named Languil. Immediately after the execution, Langia's face writhed in convulsions for 5-6 seconds. Then the head calmed down and the eyelids closed. But after the scientist called the criminal by name, he opened his eyes. According to Borje, Langia's view was clear and meaningful. However, after 25-30 seconds the head stopped responding to the scientist’s voice.
Does the brain continue to live and perceive the world around us for a few minutes after the head instantly flies off the shoulders, as, for example, in the guillotine?
Wednesday marked 125 years since the last execution by beheading in Denmark, bringing with it a creepy question from a reader: Does a person die instantly when their head is cut off?
“I just once heard that the brain dies from loss of blood only a few minutes after cutting off the head, that is, people executed, for example, by the guillotine, in principle could “see” and “hear” their surroundings, although they were already dead. Is it true?" - asks Anette.
The thought of seeing your own headless body in anyone will make you shudder, and in fact this question arose several hundred years ago, when the guillotine began to be used as a humane method of execution after the French Revolution.
The severed head turned red
The revolution was a real bloodbath, during which 14 thousand heads were cut off from March 1793 to August 1794.
And it was then that the question that interested our reader was first raised - this happened in connection with the execution by guillotine of Charlotte Corday, the woman who killed the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, sentenced to death.
After the execution, rumors spread that when one of the revolutionaries took her severed head out of the basket and slapped her in the face, her face was distorted with anger. There were those who claimed that they saw her blush from the insult.
But could this really happen?
The brain can live a little
“She couldn’t blush anyway, because that requires blood pressure,” says animal physiology professor Tobias Wang of Aarhus University, where he studies circulation and metabolism, among other things.
Nevertheless, he cannot decisively exclude that after cutting off her head she was still conscious for some time.
“The thing with our brain is that its mass makes up only 2% of the entire body, while it consumes about 20% of energy. The brain itself does not have a glycogen reserve (energy depot - Videnskab), so as soon as the blood supply stops, it immediately ends up in the hands of God, so to speak.”
In other words, the question is how long the brain has enough energy, and the professor wouldn't be surprised if it lasted at least a couple of seconds.
If we turn to his domain of zoology, there is at least one species of animal that is known to have a head that can continue to live without a body: reptiles.
Severed turtle heads can live for several more days
On YouTube, for example, you can find terrifying videos where the heads of snakes without a body quickly snap their mouths, ready to bite into the victim with their long poisonous teeth.
This is possible because reptiles have a very slow metabolism, so if the head is intact, their brain can continue to live.
“Turtles especially stand out,” says Tobias Wang, who tells of a colleague who had to use turtle brains for experiments and put the severed heads in the refrigerator, assuming they would, of course, die there.
“But they lived for another two or three days,” says Tobias Wang, adding that this, like the guillotine question, raises an ethical dilemma.
“From an animal ethics perspective, the fact that turtle heads do not die immediately after being separated from the body may be a problem.”
“When we need a turtle’s brain, and it must not contain any anesthetics, we put the head in liquid nitrogen, and then it dies instantly,” the scientist explains.
Lavoisier winked from the basket
Returning to us people, Tobias Wang told the famous story about the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794.
“Being one of the greatest scientists in history, he asked his good friend, the mathematician Lagrange, to count how many times he winked after his head was cut off.”
Thus Lavoisier was about to make his final contribution to science by trying to help answer the question of whether a person remains conscious after cutting off his head.
He was going to blink once per second, and, according to some stories, blinked 10 times, and according to others - 30 times, but all this, as Tobias Vand says, unfortunately, is still a myth.
According to science historian William B. Jensen of the University of Cincinnati in the US, the wink is not mentioned in any of the accepted biographies of Lavoisier, which, however, says that Lagrange was present at the execution, but was in the corner of the square - too far away to perform your part of the experiment.
The severed head looked at the doctor
The guillotine was introduced as a symbol of a new, humanistic order in society. Therefore, rumors about Charlotte Corday and others were completely inappropriate and gave rise to lively scientific debates among doctors in France, England and Germany.
The question was never satisfactorily answered and was raised again and again until 1905, when one of the most convincing experiments was carried out on human heads.
Foreign Policy 05/14/2015 Aftenposten 07/21/2016 BBC Russian Service 08/20/2014 Gezitter.org 01/27/2015 This experiment was described by the French doctor Beaurieux, who conducted it with the head of Henri Languille, sentenced to death.
As Borjo describes it, immediately after the guillotine he noted that Langille's lips and eyes moved spasmodically for 5-6 seconds, after which the movement stopped. And when Doctor Borjo loudly shouted “Langille!” a couple of seconds later, the eyes opened, the pupils focused and looked intently at the doctor, as if he had woken the man from sleep.
“I saw undoubtedly living eyes looking at me,” writes Borjo.
After this, the eyelids drooped, but the doctor again managed to wake up the convict’s head by shouting his name, and only on the third attempt nothing happened.
Not minutes, but seconds
This account is not a scientific report in the modern sense, and Tobias Wang doubts that a person can really remain conscious for that long.
“I believe a couple of seconds is really possible,” he says, and explains that reflexes and muscle contractions may remain, but the brain itself suffers enormous blood loss and goes into a coma, so that the person quickly loses consciousness.
This assessment is supported by a tried-and-true rule known to cardiologists, which states that when the heart stops, the brain remains conscious for up to four seconds if a person is standing, up to eight seconds if he is sitting, and up to 12 seconds if he is lying down.
As a result, we have not really clarified whether the head can retain consciousness after being cut off from the body: minutes, of course, are excluded, but the version of seconds does not seem incredible.
And if you count: one, two, three, you can easily see that this is enough to realize your surroundings, which means that this method of execution has nothing to do with humanity.
The guillotine has become a symbol of a new, humane society
The French guillotine had great symbolic significance in the new republic after the revolution, where it was introduced as a new, humane way of carrying out the death penalty.
According to Danish historian Inga Floto, who wrote the book A Cultural History of the Death Penalty (2001), the guillotine became a tool that showed “how the new regime's humane attitude toward the death penalty contrasted with the barbarity of the previous regime.”
It is no coincidence that the guillotine appears as a formidable mechanism with a clear and simple geometry, which emanates rationality and efficiency.
The guillotine was named after the physician Joseph Guillotin, who after the French Revolution became famous and praised for proposing a reform of the penal system, making the law equal for all and punishing criminals equally regardless of their status.
© flickr.com, Karl-Ludwig Poggemann Severed head of Louis XVI, executed by guillotine
In addition, Guillotin argued that execution should be carried out humanely so that the victim suffered minimal pain, in contrast to the brutal practice of the times when an executioner with an ax or sword often had to strike several times before he could separate the head from the body.
When, in 1791, the French National Assembly, after long debates about whether to abolish the death penalty altogether, decided instead that “the death penalty should be limited to the simple taking of life without any torture of the convicted person,” Guillotin’s ideas were adopted.
This led to earlier forms of "falling blade" instruments being refined into the guillotine, which thus became a significant symbol of the new social order.
The guillotine was abolished in 1981
The guillotine remained the only instrument of execution in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 (!). Public executions were abolished in France in 1939.
Latest executions in Denmark
In 1882, Anders Nielsen Sjællænder, a farm worker on the island of Lolland, was sentenced to death for murder.
On November 22, 1882, the only executioner in the country, Jens Sejstrup, swung an ax.
The execution caused a great stir in the press - especially because Seistrup had to be hit with an ax several times before his head was separated from his body.
Anders Schelländer became the last person to be publicly executed in Denmark.
The next execution took place behind closed doors at Horsens prison. The death penalty in Denmark was abolished in 1933.
Soviet scientists transplanted dog heads
If you can handle a little more horrifying and spine-chilling scientific experimentation, watch this video that shows Soviet experiments simulating the reverse situation: severed dogs' heads are kept alive using artificial blood supply.
The video was presented by British biologist JBS Haldane, who said that he himself had conducted several similar experiments.
Doubts arose whether the video was propaganda exaggerating the achievements of Soviet scientists. Nevertheless, it is a generally accepted fact that Russian scientists were pioneers in the field of organ transplantation, including transplanting the heads of dogs.
These experiences inspired South African doctor Christiaan Barnard, who earned worldwide fame by performing the world's first heart transplant.
We thank our reader for her question and are sending her a Videnskab.dk T-shirt as a reward. We also thank our expert Tobias Wang for helping us shed some light on this daunting topic. If you want science yourself, send it here
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
Thoughts and feelings of a severed head
Due to the fact that when the head is cut off from the body, the main thinking organ of a person - the brain - remains intact, scientists have long been interested in the question of whether the murdered person is able to think after execution. French journalist Michel Delin was also puzzled by the search for an answer. During the execution of one convict, a professional doctor put a volunteer named Wirtz into a hypnotic trance, thanks to which he was supposed to feel everything that happened to the convict. When the criminal's head was cut off, Wirtz told the doctor and two witnesses that the head sees and feels everything. She sees her wife, child and judges in red robes. She does not understand where her body is and is in great pain.
What to expect from such dreams in reality?
If seeing a man with his head cut off in a dream makes you feel scared, distant or lost, this may be a sign that the dream is showing you that your head and heart are not in balance - one may dominate the other.
Perhaps your head controls your heart and you are too rational. Think about where in your life you feel disconnected from your feelings, or perhaps you are being too intellectual and not allowing your emotions to express themselves. Such dreams often occur when a person is afraid to allow himself to express feelings, due to fear of pain or humiliation. Perhaps the consequence of such dreams was an unpleasant experience from the past, when your feelings or emotions were misunderstood by people around you.
Remember that other people in your dreams are often simply reflections of yourself, and a dream about someone's head being cut off could be a symbol of an "attack" on some belief you hold.
Conversely, perhaps your emotions are getting out of control and you need to stop and think about things logically. Your dreams may invite you to stop and think about where your strong feelings might take you. Maybe you have behaved so irrationally that you are “losing your head.”
However, if beheading people in your dream really makes you anxious or upset, it could have a different meaning. Like the assault dream, the beheading dream can symbolize an area of your life where you feel vulnerable, criticized by others, or criticized by yourself.
If you dream of a severed head, observed in dreams as if from the outside, then such a vision may be a warning that in real life you may be drawn into a dangerous adventure in which a woman is involved.
The head is the top of our body, so in a dream it can be a symbol of the top of what you strive for. Ask yourself why the dream of a severed head came to you right now - are there any problems of dominance or ambition in your life? Have you become so ambitious that you sacrifice the things that really matter to you? You may be neglecting your health or those you care about in your attempts to “get ahead.”
A dream of a decapitated body or severed head may be asking you where your emotions and logic are out of balance, and inviting you to reconnect areas of your life that seem separate or unconnected.
