See subject. “One morning, after troubled dreams…” if you prefer.
Yes, you have no face and you can’t scream, even if you think you must. Can’t smell the coffee, or, getting closer to full OP, if there’s poison gas seeping into the room.
But I was wondering specifically on the autonomity (is that a word?) of other organs and various subsystems in the body, relative to brain control, excepting the Big Two of circulation and oxygenation: what would fail first, and the repercussions on other body functions.
I know the parasympathetic response system runs out of the brain, so adjustments and control of those matters stop–excluding circulation and breathing. Of course my ground rules are problematic–pneumonia affects the breathing, for example. Brain does lots of stuff; I guess OP also speaks to the priority of the SOS signals from the rest of the chemically-driven meat of the body.
Let us say your breathing and heart functions just start out ok until shut down otherwise.
But basically you’re just lying there. I thought that one way you might die, eventually, is from infections of the bed sores you’ll eventually develop. But surely the lethal degradation is quicker by other means.
Then I thought, if this isn’t a question for the GQ Teemimg Millions, nothing is.
ETA: (Less comically: How does this differ–ie, what’s left–to “brain-dead” people on life support?)
It seems that the OP is asking what happens if the brain stops controling anything.
And I think the answer would be what would happen to the body of brain dead people, if they were just kept ventilated (for instance not given any drug to regulate blood pressure or anything of that sort).
And it seems to me this was discussed in great detail in a GD thread about some American girl who had been declared dead while her parents insisted on her being kept alive last year. But since I don’t remember her name, I can’t find the thread.
What good is breathing and blood flow if it can’t get to the brain? You seem to be overly worried about the below-the-neck-body when it’s the above-the-neck-part that is in bigger problem.
If you play the game Fallout New Vegas, at one point you have your brain removed. Later in the game you can even talk to your brain, which for some reason is a bit reluctant to go back into your body. But then, the Fallout series is based on cheesy 1950s style sci fi, and it’s not exactly known for realistic biology or physics.
Anyway, there is actually a GQ question buried under all of this.
What exactly do you mean by this?
Your heart can actually beat on its own. What it can’t do on its own is adjust its rhythm for things like pumping more when you are exerting yourself. But basically your heart makes its own rhythm, and the brain only tells it to go faster or slower (that’s oversimplifying a bit but it’s the general idea of it). Without the brain connected to the heart, you end up with a low heart rate and low blood pressure, something that people who get heart transplants have to deal with.
The respiratory center of your brain controls your breathing, and unlike the heart, without a functioning brain, you won’t breathe. So if you mean you were breathing ok and then your brain suddenly somehow goes poof, then you stop breathing at that point.
We’ll assume some kind of message board magic that keeps you breathing to continue your hypothetical here.
Without a brain, you also lose some of your ability to regulate your body’s temperature. You won’t sweat or get goosebumps.
I think the rest of your organs will mostly continue to work. People with spinal cord injuries need to be moved around periodically or they develop bed sores and/or blood clots. Christopher Reeve developed an infection from a bed sore and eventually died from complications related to it.
At last. No time to respond to your post, but came in to counter-snark. Only a fucking computer engineering geek sees the Kafka and the Trumbo, and only a mod accepts OP as willingly as one does here Suns vanishing? Can one no longer post OP “How many pushups could I do on the sun?” without one 1-sentence post saying you can’t do pushups on the Sun anyway (for any number of reasons, presumably, any and all of which are too obvious to supply), and another, more empathetically and showing for GQa closer reading, 1-sentences “You can’t–you’d burn up before you finished the first one.”
Jeez. Try to set-up an OP on what are the limits of autonomic function in the human body with a non-literal set up. Tough crowd.
ETA: I just saw how I thought this OP, and its setup, tone, and style were tailor made for GQ…
