Just a head

1
Just a head

• Decapitation, reanimation, isolation, feral
  children, and the human head transplant

Caravaggios The Decapitation of Saint John the
Baptist
2
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

3

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

4
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?

5
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
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Dr. Joseph Guillotin?

• Didnt 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.

7
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 dogs to continue blood
  flow.
• Muscles reacted, but too much time had elapsed
  for any consciousness

8
Beaurieux

• Did experiments right on the scaffold,
• Notably a prisoner named Languille
• Twice Beaurieux called out his name and the
  heads eyes opened and focused

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Human head transplants?

• Anastomosis stiching one blood vessel to
  another.
• Guthrie Carrel early masters ? started stiching
  everything to everything else
• Nobel prize stuff
• Early 1900s stiched grafted a dogs head onto
  another dog, lasted 7 hours

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1950s 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

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Now it gets strange

• 1960s 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

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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.
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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.

14
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.

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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

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• 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

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Why it wont happen

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

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But what does all this say about us?

• How afraid of death are we?
• Afraid enough to build pyramids?