Consciousness after decapitation

[JohnSawyer]

Does the head remain briefly conscious after decapitation (revisited)?

What I deduce from Cecil’s article, is that some people remain conscious, and others don’t.

[samclem]

@JohnSawyer

Does the head remain briefly conscious after decapitation (revisited)? - The Straight Dope

What I deduce from Cecil’s article, is that some people remain conscious, and others don’t.

I’m not sure you should take Cecil’s perspective on this as gospel. Probably because he couldn’t actually perform the [del]surge[/del]research due to a lack of volunteers.

There have been many past threads on this, and the conclusion of scientific types would indicate the consciousness of a victim of such an event would be measured in a few seconds at most. And the ability to actually respond emotionally would likely be non-existent.
Here’s one we did two years ago http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7644786&highlight=decapitation#post7644786 with an excellent reply which I"ll quote here:

@joema

While it’s impossible to ever ask a beheading victim what their experience was, we have examples of immediate (but reversible) blood circulation loss to the brain, so we know how long you remain conscious – maybe 5 seconds.

One example is pilots who pull extreme Gs, causing "G-Induced Loss of Consciousness (GLOC). This deprives the brain of circulation and (absent countermeasures) you become unconscious very quickly, in a few seconds. The general experience is not limited to just fighter pilots. Anybody who’s flown a light plane and pulled over 4 Gs knows your vision greys out very quickly – just seconds.

A key item is that your vision goes first – it’s the most sensitive to disruption of blood perfusion.

A beheading victim’s circulatory perfusion to the brain obviously immediately stops, with blood pressure dropping to zero. While brain tissues can survive a minute or two in that state before irreversible decay, the issue is consciousness.

Therefore I’d expect useful consciousness to be no more than a few seconds, based on total lack of tissue perfusion alone. Pilot GLOC examples indicate vision probably is the first to go.

Based on this, it seems extremely unlikely that consciousness continues for more than a few seconds. In particular accounts of eyes looking about for 15-20 seconds as indicative of voluntary, conscious action are almost totally not correct.

This doesn’t tell us whether the severed head would retain sensory input for a few seconds, but it does bound the upper limit of useful consciousness at no more than that.