Can you be buried alive

I must decide whether to pull the plug. Not true! Not only have you lost all the upper brain functions that create your memories and behaviors and allow you to think and talk, but you have also lost all the involuntary stuff your lower brain dos to keep you alive, like controlling your heart, respiration, nervous system, temperature, and reflexes.

You cannot recover from brain death. There is no gray area brain matter joke : either you are brain dead or you are not. If you are in a coma, on the other hand, you are legally very much alive. In a coma, you still have brain function, which doctors can measure by observing electrical activity and your reactions to external stimuli. In other words, your body continues to breathe, your heart beats, etc.

Even better, you can, potentially, recover from a coma and regain consciousness. Okay, but what if I fall into a deep, deep coma?

Will someone eventually pull he plug and send me off to the mortuary? Will I be trapped in both a casket and in the prison of my mind? We now have a whole battery of scientific tests to confirm that someone is not just in a coma, but really, truly brain-dead. History shows that taphophobia , or the fear of being buried alive, has some degree of merit, albeit a small one.

As early as the 14th century, there are accounts of specific people being buried alive. While likely apocryphal, when his tomb was opened, the body of philosopher John Duns Scotus of the High Middle Ages was reportedly found outside of his coffin, his hands torn up in a way that suggests he had once tried to free himself.

In 17th century England, it is documented that a woman by the name of Alice Blunden was buried alive. As the story goes, she was so knocked out after having imbibed a large quantity of poppy tea that a doctor holding a mirror to her nose and mouth pronounced her dead.

Tea made from dried, unwashed seed pods would have contained morphine and codeine, which are sedatives. Her family quickly made arrangements for her burial, but two days after she was laid in the ground, children playing near her grave heard noises.

Their school master went to check the gravesite for himself. He found that Blunden was still alive, but it took another day to exhume her. She was so close to death that she was returned to her grave, where a guard stood by before deserting his post. The next morning, she was found dead, but only after struggling to free herself once more. When Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov of Kazan in Russia collapsed at home following a heart attack in , she was soon declared dead.

A few days later, as she was lying in her casket at her own funeral, she woke up. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Science Contributors.

When blood CO2 levels reach 55 mm Hg, a living brain will usually tell the body to spontaneously breathe. Dead brains have zero electrical activity. A radioactive isotope is injected into your bloodstream. After a period of time, a radioactive counter is held over your head to see if blood is flowing to your brain. If there is blood flow to the brain, the brain cannot be called dead. A person has to fail a lot of tests to be declared brain-dead.

And more than one doctor has to confirm brain-death. Having seen thousands of dead bodies in my career, let me tell you — dead people are very dead in a very predictable way. Not that my words sound all that comforting. Or scientific. But I feel confident saying that this is not going to happen to you. Published by W. TED Talk of the Day.