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Guillotine Death
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No best answer has yet been selected by Bonzo 2000. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I've discussed this in the past as well. I think we found a few places on the web stating that a head could live for 5 - 15 seconds after decapitation and then finally dyinig of 'shock'!
I would expect a head to live several seconds because there is still blood and oxygen in the brain. Hmm... any volunteers? ;)
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.
Decapitation quite different from fainting...we're talking about having enough oxygen in your blood to provide fuel for the neural correlates of consciousness, and this goes VERY fast at decapitation. You would probably die more quickly from the Bigley method (sorry) than by the guillotine, it is hypothesized. Since the heart is still trying to pump, once you cut the jugular a huge amount of air is drawn into the heart, which accelerates the loss of oxygen to the brain.