If cardiac arrest is when the heart suddenly stops, what's it called when the brain suddenly stops?

If it’s called cardiac arrest when the heart suddenly stops, what’s it called when the brain suddenly stops?

Death. I don’t mean to be flip. Brains can’t stop and start the same way that hearts can. Brains are electro-chemical and its billions of neuronal action potentials fire across synapses many times a second even when they are at rest. If all brain activity stops completely, it also shuts down most other essential life functions and the person dies instantly. In fact, that is one of the more common definitions of death.

There are cases where people that were supposedly ‘brain dead’ came back to life but that was just a misdiagnosis They always had some brain activity even if it wasn’t detected.

I should add that there are some sudden heart conditions that fall under the category of ‘cardiac arrest’ in which the heart is still trying to function but cannot maintain an effective rhythm. That can cause death very quickly if it isn’t shocked back into rhythm with a defibrillator (emergency shock paddles). Something similar can happen in the brain as well during severe seizures. Epilepsy and some other types of seizures are roughly analogous to a heart fibrillation. Shock therapy has been used for those type of brain conditions as well but the preferred treatment is drugs and (very rarely) brain surgery to stop the runaway brain activity.

“Reality television.”

I would suggest a coma as being closest. The brain under anaesthesia is also pretty close to stopped as well. The question is a bit about state versus changing of state. Brain processes are changes of state. Whether you can stop the changes of state, and preserve that existing state in a form than can be used for subsequent restart of state changes is probably not really understood. But recovery from coma and anaesthesia are about as close as you will get. There are still some residual processes in both cases, but whether life would permanently stop if they were shut down in the same manner as the rest of the brain, probably remains unknown.

Possibly near death near freezing might also count. As they say, a hypothermic body isn’t dead until it is warm and dead. People occasionally do recover from insanely low body temperatures, where body function does seem to be absent.

I would vigorously dispute that. The brain under anesthesia is definitely less metabolically active than the awake brain, but there’s still a lot going on. Anesthesia seems to do a lot of its work by disrupting communications between various parts of the brain, not by turning it off.

“Love”

Puberty:D

Yeah, I could have put that better. I was really thinking about consciousness, and the shutdown of effective operation of the brain - which seems more like a TV off channel filled with snow than a TV that is off. So there is lots of activity, but it isn’t clear how directed or useful it is - the state changes that are normal operation are disrupted or ineffective. What is again really interesting is how the brain resumes normal operation. Somehow the state left after the disruption doesn’t matter. Then again, the time it takes to regain full function after a GA is perhaps a little disturbing.

The heart does basically one thing, and cardiac arrest is when it stops doing it. The brain does a huge number of very complex tasks. The brain doesn’t just stop unless its blood supply is cut off, trauma, or possibly other similar catastrophic failure (IANAD and there are Ds here but I thought I’d throw this in). But it doesn’t just stop, in a way analogous to the heart.

Voting republican. Oh yes I did. I went there.

Moderator Warning

Mr. Nylock, political jabs of this kind are against the rules in General Questions. Given that you’ve been around long enough to know this, and your remark suggests you’re aware of it, I’m making this an official warning. Don’t do this again.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Sorry, I was only joking - I have nothing against voting republican.

Jabs like that aren’t permitted in GQ even as jokes. They’re still jabs.

A conclusion is what it is called when someone stops thinking.

I like this equivalence best.

Ventricular fibrillation = sudden cessation of heartbeat (loss of organized function)
Generalized seizure = sudden cessation of consciuosness (loss of most organized functions)