When are you dead?

Religion Dispatches discusses the new scientific reports on allegedly "brain dead" patients a few of whom have an active life of the mind:


This is a tricky question, where science and religion often hide, or collide. It’s answered in a diversity of ways by different cultures at different times, by different physicians in different hospitals, different shamans in different tribes. Is it when your heart stops working (as in Japan and Shintoism)? When your soul leaves your body (as in Tibet and Buddhism)? When your brain stops working? When a certain part of your brain stops working? Who decides when you’re dead?

Can you be dead in body, but not in mind? Vice versa?

Cogito ergo sum?

A new study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine adds intriguing neuroscientific fuel to the fires already ablaze around these questions.

The article asks, "Based on this new MRI research, we asked the question: If your Dad can only communicate through ‘thought MRI’ like patients in this study, would you consider him alive?"

What about yourself - would you want to be kept alive?

Read the study in the New England Journal of Medicine

Posted by Ann Fontaine on February 16, 2010 2:28 PM | |
Comments (1)

In my professional experience, most folks wouldn't want to be. And even in addressing this question, this study isn't as helpful as some might think.

Marshall Scott

Posted by Execute [TypeKey Profile Page] | February 16, 2010 10:50 PM

Add your comments

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Reminder: At Episcopal Café, we hope to establish an ethic of transparency by requiring all contributors and commentators to make submissions under their real names. For more details see our Feedback Policy.

Advertising Space