Newsweek on Death and Dying

Science continues to shed vitalism in understanding how the brain dies, but cultural inertia remains.

By Brian Wowk, Ph.D.

Vitalism is a belief in a “life force” that distinguishes living from non-living things. The idea that death is associated with the loss of some kind of electrical life energy is still prevalent in our culture.  A heart that “flat lines” on television is thought to be dead, even though a heart can be transplanted after being electrically silent in an ice chest for hours.  A brain that “flat lines” is also thought to be dead, even though deep hypothermia or certain drugs can make a brain electrically silent for hours or even days.  Thousands of people have been resuscitated from cardiac arrest lasting long enough to inactivate the brain.  Yet people still equate life signs with life itself.

The difference between living and non-living matter is now known to be a difference in how matter is organized.  It’s not a difference in energy or particular functional activity.  There is nothing about brain activity ceasing per se that is synonymous with death, biologically, legally, or philosophically.  I discuss these issues in detail in my article, “Matters of Life and Death: Reflections on the Philosophy and Biology of Human Cryopreservation.”

In 2007, Newsweek magazine wrote about progress in brain resuscitation (“Back to Life: The Science of Reviving the Dead,” Newsweek, July 22, 2007).  The article asked the question, “But when the brain shuts down, where does the mind go?”  This question is tacit acknowledgement of the cultural belief that cessation of function is a metaphysical event.  Yet we know from experience that the mind is like non-volatile computer memory, returning to expression when the brain becomes active again.  The article includes clinical anecdotes and emerging thinking about the difference between acute ischemic injury (injury from stopped blood flow) and reperfusion injury (injury after blood flow is restored), highlighting that actual death of a brain occurs many hours after a stopped heart is restarted, not while blood flow is stopped.  There is a wide window of time when intervention to stop the brain from dying from stopped blood flow is still theoretically possible.  The article explicitly mentions cryptographer Ralph Merkle’s concept of ‘information theoretic death,” which is death defined by loss of particular cell structure rather than absence of function.  The article makes the obvious connection to cryonics.

Recently Newsweek wrote again about progress understanding how the brain dies (Neuroscientists Discover Source of 'Wave of Death' at End of Consciousness,” Newsweek, December 13, 2023).  The article covered research by the Paris Brain Institute in which specific patterns and locations of brain electrical activity correlating with “anoxic depolarization” were observed during stopped blood circulation.  Unfortunately the article and press release from the Institute seemed to leverage vitalism to create sensationalism.  They perhaps unwittingly reinforced the misconception that death is a discrete and rapid event related to electricity.  The observed electrical patterns were called a “wave of death,” (even though nothing died) which the Newsweek headline equated with the “end of consciousness.”  A reader could easily believe that science had discovered the moment of death, a surely momentous discovery.  

The article said,

“Clinically and legally, death is generally considered to be a well-defined state characterized, at least, by a complete and irreversible cessation of brain activities and functions. According to this view, the moment of death is represented by a discrete event in which all brain processes abruptly cease.”

This is incorrect. Most legal deaths are pronounced based on cardiopulmonary criteria that don't involve the brain at all, just stopped breathing and heartbeat.  When brain death does occur in medicine, brain death being the only type of death that references brain activity, it's not an abrupt process. Legal brain death develops over many hours or days while on life support in an ICU.  Instead of, “Clinically and legally,” this sentence should have been prefaced by, “In popular perception.”

The article also said,

“But from a neurological point of view, death is a difficult concept to define. A growing body of evidence is demonstrating that the phenomenon is not marked by an abrupt switch from life to death but involves a process that can last several minutes and is accompanied by a complex set of changes in brain activity and, in some cases, is reversible.”

This is getting closer to the truth, but the complete process is much longer than minutes.

“But this silence is quickly interrupted by a wave of death appearing on the flat EEG, which reflects a sudden phenomenon that scientists call 'anoxic depolarization.' This phenomenon appears to initiate cell death in a region of the brain known as the cortex. 'This critical event, called anoxic depolarization, induces neuronal death throughout the cortex. '”

This leads the reader to think that this moment is when cells die. But then the article says,

“Recovering from such a cataclysm requires so much energy that neurons often die in the minutes and hours following the wave of death.”

So the “wave of death” isn’t a wave of cells dying; it’s a wave of injury (anoxic depolarization) initiating a process that can lead to later cell death.  This wave isn’t even necessarily prognostic of death because the article also says,

“If the brain is rapidly re-oxygenated, the effects of anoxic depolarization can be reversed. This process, previously discovered by the team in 2020, is marked by a "wave of resuscitation," which heralds a slow recovery of brain functions.”

And finally, the most important point in the article and press release:

“’We now need to establish the exact conditions under which these functions can be restored and develop neuroprotective drugs to support resuscitation….’”

This could have been said without tantalizing that science had discovered an electrical moment of death.  But then maybe no one would have read the article. 

Did readers come away with the understanding that in fact nothing dies quickly when blood circulation stops, and that cells instead become primed to die later?  That’s the key message of this research, and the path forward for developing brain resuscitation technology of the 21st century and beyond.