My latent morbid curiosity, brought to the fore by relentless decapitations by the IS.
How painful is decapitation? How long does the victim retain consciousness and therefore feel pain? Because the neck has so many vital spots, I feel not too long.
If I am captured by the loonies and given a choice, should I choose to lose my head rather than burn alive?
I am personally terrified of fire, and think burning alive is the most painful way to die.
The Master has spoken on this subject.
The duration of consciousness would largely depend on where the incision starts and how quickly it proceeds.
Side to side will cut a major artery from the beginning so it ought to be over quickly enough. Will someone quickly lose consciousness if only 1 of the two carotid arteries is severed?
Front to back, which ISIS seems to prefer, would take more time, chiefly depending on how quickly the cutter gets to the carotid arteries. Keep in mind that a guillotine cuts a lot faster than a guy with a knife.
In any case, it ought to be better than burning alive. Perhaps the more medically knowledgeable here can tell us what, exactly, kills you when you burn alive.
The Master has spoken at greater length here on this subject, including recounting a first-person eyewitness account of an accidental beheading.
If we still executed prisoners by beheading, this may be something that modern science would allow us to get some better results on, at least, by measuring brain activity and so forth with the variety of tools now available to us.
Perhaps one of the states that is these days considering alternative methods of execution in the potential absence of lethal injection should be encouraged to consider beheading. For science.
Much of that story has been analyzed by sciency types on the board and been discounted. There are at least 2-3 threads about the column in CoCC.
mandala, you might enjoy this book I just finished: Severed: a history of heads lost and heads found. It addresses the question of whether heads retain consciousness for any time after decapitation.
No.
Pretty interesting stuff!
I’d go with the decapitation. The way they do it with a saw not as quick and painless as the guillotine, but you won’t have to worry too much past the point where they cut through a major artery. Burning is way more unpleasant (although I suspect that if burning is on the table, “getting to choose” is not.)
As the old joke goes, a hot stake is better than a cold chop.
Yeah, I’m no “sciency type”, but I have to assume you’d instantly pass out and die from the shock, trauma and blood loss of having your head removed and that any facial movement or perceived display of emotion is a combination of involuntary reflexes and projecting by the eye-witnesses.
I think I have to buy that book! I have had a morbid curiosity about this subject for as long as I can remember.
It’s hard to believe anything could happen “instantly” in an organic system. Certainly the brain would take a few moments to die, and in those grim moments, neurons would fire wildly as they die (as they often do in a dying brain), creating some sort of conscious experience, if not pain, for the victim to ‘feel’ - consciously. Certainly the brain does not need a body to experience consciousness?
It doesn’t need a body, but it needs blood pressure.
The brain uses a lot of your blood supply - something like a quarter of total circulation. Once the head was severed, the blood pressure is going to drop to nearly zero pretty quick. As circulation ceases and the brain uses up the supply of oxygenated blood, brain activity may continue for a few minutes but consciousness is going to end almost at once.
A good analogy is a judo sleeper choke. In such chokes, pressure on the vagus nerve and the carotid sinuses causes a huge and very rapid drop in blood pressure and in circulation to the brain. Unconsciousness ensues in a very short time - three to five seconds, IME. I have done it to hundreds of people, and had it done to myself more than once. We are struggling along, usually in groundwork, I slap on the choke, they continue to struggle for a second or two and then they just slump over. The first time it happened to me, my opponent got beside me, I was trying to turn him, he got his wrists in the right place and suddenly I was over on the sideline of the mat where no one would step on me. It passes almost immediately - I got up, took a deep breath or two, and went back into randori.
If that is what decapitation is like, it is about as painless a death as can be imagined. No doubt the severing of the neck is unpleasant, but a quick cut as with a guillotine would be followed by nearly instant euthanasia.
Regards,
Shodan
Of course. The latter is far more painful a death than the former.
I would second that recommendation. Actually, the bit about whether heads retain consciousness seemed to me to be one of the book’s more predictable sections. Possibly because I’ve read too many Dope threads on the subject. But Larson does come up with some good material.
Tell me, why’d I have to go and get myself decapitated?
This really is a major inconvenience, oh man, I really hate it
Such a drag, now … Can’t eat, I can’t breathe, I can’t snore
I can’t belch or yodel anymore
Can’t spit or blow my nose or even read Sports Illustrated
-Al Yankovic, “A Complicated Song”
Not to mention, scratch that pesky itch…
If you’re lucky, smoke inhalation. If you’re unlucky, something much slower and more painful. In the medieval era, executioners who wanted to be (relatively) merciful would use green wood that produced lots of smoke, so that the prisoner would suffocate to death before he, uh, roasted.
Wasn’t human, but in this video off Liveleak you can see a goat getting beheaded with a machete. Towards the end you can see the head still moving. Not sure what the implications of that are.