a morbid question about nick berg

[Mattk]

sorry to ask this but i was pondering this earlier today.you may recall the horrific happenings to the american nick berg in iraq last year where his beheading was filmed and i was wondering - would he still techincally be alive after the decapitation ? ie would he still be conscious for several minutes ?

sorry to ask and apologies for any offence !

[Quizmonster]

There have been - mostly rather dubious - reports that the eyes and mouth of a lopped-off head - as in French guillotine executions - do show signs of movement.  The most credible was by a Doctor Beaurieux who attended an execution in 1905.  He mentioned lip and eyelid motion and - when he shouted the man's name twice - he claims the eyes opened and actually focussed on him both times! He describes the eyes as "undeniably living" and believes the process lasted about 30 seconds.
Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, was supposedly prepared to experiment to the end...and beyond.  Before his execution in 1794, it is claimed that he said that he would try to communicate by blinking  immediately after decapitation.  The story goes that his head did so several times.  Marie Antoinette, too - or it could have been the murderess, Charlotte Corday, depending on whose story you listen to - is said to have blushed angrily when her severed head was slapped.  (With no blood-flow?)
In a British context, while Earl Waltheof's neck was already on the block in 1076, he was reciting �The Lord's Prayer'. The headman's axe descended before he had quite finished and the story is that the words: "But deliver us from evil.  Amen" were reportedly spoken by the severed head.  (In the absence of airflow and a connected voice-box etc, I'm not sure how that supposedly worked...but it's a good story!)
Although all of these tales are almost certainly apocryphal, it has been calculated that the human brain has enough stored oxygen to function for about seven seconds after the head is severed.  Presumably, therefore, some form of �consciousness' could conceivably remain for some period of time.

[5029]

I would doubt it very much - whereas it is possible in the case of a guillotine, where the beheading takes only a second.  However in the case of those beheaded in iraq, it was done with a knife, and their necks were hacked at for up to 3/4 of an hour before it finally came off altogether.

 

I doubt if anyone would be alive after that

[Octavius]

Beheading is intentional decapitation and is intended as a mean of murder.  Decpatation is the removal (poss accidental) of a living bings head, typically resulting in death.

 

Separation of the head from the rest of the body inevitably causes death in humans: there is heavy bleeding from both the head and decapitated body, causing a massive drop in blood pressure and rapid loss of consciousness followed quickly by brain death. Even if the bleeding were stopped, the lack of circulation to supply oxygen to the brain would rapidly lead to brain death.

 

No known medical emergency treatment can save a decapitated patient. In theory, connecting a cardiac pump to a severed head might keep it alive, but this is not known to have ever been tried in practice. However, head transplants have been carried out successfully in monkeys; the first stage of such a transplant, of course, is a surgical decapitation (in which, however, great care is taken to maintain the blood supply by means of catheterization). Thus, survival of a head separated from its body is not an inherent impossibility.

An even more gruesome issue is whether a decapitated head retains consciousness after separation from the body. The issue has been debated many times, especially in the context of whether beheading is or is not a humane form of execution. No definitive answer has ever emerged. Many have argued that loss of consciousness would be virtually instantaneous, either as a result of the massive drop in cerebral blood pressure, or because of the impact of the severing implement. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence, of varying degrees of credibiliy, has circulated for centuries that severed heads may, under some circumstances, retain consciousness for at least a few seconds.

[Octavius]

Please ignore all the spelling mistakes above, its been a long day.

[hopalong]

The human head stays alive for 10 seconds after decapitation