Is it possible to live with your head cut off for a small period of time?!
Question:
Is it possible to live with your head cut off for a small period of time?
Answers:
That depends on how you define "live". Generally speaking, life is medically defined by the presence of brain activity. When there isn't any brain activity present, the person in question is assumed to have suffered "brain death", which is an irreversible condition.
Once that's occurred, we can often keep the body on life support long enough to do things like harvest organs, but there's no other use for a body at that point. Just like every other dead animal out there, it's become a chunk of meat.
If your head was severed from your body, the rest of your body would be declared dead the instant it happened, even if there was a bit of leftover metabolism taking place as it wound down. However, the odds are the shock of being violently disconnected from your brain would be so profound to your body, it would shut off immediately.
Rumor from the French Revolution, though, has it that your head would live for ten to twenty seconds after the event, so it would be alive long enough to see itself drop to the ground and roll around a bit, so you could realize what happened and be very frightened before your brain starved of oxygen and died... but that's only a rumor, as we have no way of even getting close to testing the hypothesis ethically.
Effrayant, non?