• Question: if the brain stops working, can you get it to work again or does it mean you are dead?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      There are efforts to preserve brains at low temperatures in the hope that they can be reanimated in a future time with the development of appropriate future technology. But until it works, I guess you are dead.

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      In part it depends on how long it stops working for. Any bran with absolutely no evidence of function for a couple of minutes is not going to come back to life. So yes after a couple of minutes of being brain dead, you are indeed dead.

      There are some neurotoxins that can give the impression that someone is dead, but they aren’t, it’s just the doctor can misdiagnose this. So they haven’t really risen from the dead, it just looks like they have.

      Cryogenics that Darren mentions is interesting, but as he suggests, we don’t have anyway of reversing the process.

Comments