SYSK Selects: Do you stay conscious after being decapitated?

In this week's SYSK Select episode, historically speaking, decapitation was a popular means of execution -- it's been used by everyone from ancient Romans to French revolutionaries. But is there any truth to claim that victims retain their consciousness? Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi there, everybody. It's me Josh, your friend Josh, and
this week I've selected do You Really Stay Conscious After Decapitation?
It was one of our top three grizzliest episodes we've
ever done. We talked in depth about what it's like
to have your head cut off, and it's a pretty

(00:22):
grim but it's also, in my opinion, one of the
most interesting ones we've ever done. So if you are
fain of heart or week of stomach, skip this one
if you like, But I dare you to listen anyway,
because it is that good. Welcome to Stuff you should
know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome

(00:47):
to the podcast on Josh Clark. There is Charles W.
Chuck Bryant asleep at the mic. Wake up, Chuck. I couldn't.
I could fall asleep right now. That's try with you,
is it, Paul? It's just a means to sweepy. Are
you you have a long night last night? Yeah? I
haven't been sleeping that great really. Plus I got the
window open because the weather so nice, but that means

(01:09):
I hear birds in traffic really early, so I've been
waking up at like six fifteen. Yeah, I hate that.
I hate those birds, the early birds catching their worms?
Are you don't stupid happy songs? Yeah? I don't like
that either. I had a weird, uncomfortable dream last night.
I was trying to rent a car and everything was
sold out because Texas A and M was in some
sort of crazy championship and there's like five thousand people

(01:32):
there and they'd rented all the cars. So I had
to stand around and wait until somebody brought a car
back and jump on that. And there's like twelve other
people doing the same thing. It was kind of no idea,
why out of nowhere? Huh, I thought, at least to
be ut No, so chuck, so weird, you know you
know what that was? That was an example. Dreams in

(01:56):
general are example of my neural networks. Whatever I learned
or thought of that that day, um or something and
jogged my memory. Whatever. There's a there's an idea that
dreams are the basically your brain strengthening neural networks by
stimulating different ones, basically doing some some PaperWorks, some sorting

(02:16):
while your body sleeping. Yeah, we still haven't done our
Deluxe Dream podcast. We haven't. Somebody asked for it recently.
I think we're I think we're getting more and more
prepared to it's coming. Okay, But um, that idea is
kind of is based on um one of well, it's
one of the things that's based on what a guy
named Francis Crick, who you'll remember was one of the

(02:39):
co discoverers of the structure d n A. Yeah, he
was the d right. I don't know you're thinking of
rutten day. Um. He later later on in his career
really got into the idea of this thing called the
astonishing hypothesis. But it is it's a little depressing if
you ask me. We've talked about it before. I think

(03:00):
we talked about a mirror neurons. But the astonishing hypothesis
is essentially that all of our thoughts, are dreams, are beliefs,
our hopes, are fears, are connections to others. Every aspect
of the human experience is based on neurons and their excitement. Right.

(03:21):
And he said, quite famously, quote, uh, you're nothing but
a bowl of neurons or pack. Okay, but I said, quote, yeah,
so you're just rewriting about a sack of neurons like that,
a fistful of neurons. Oh god, that's awesome, thank you.
That's a band name. I knew you were going to

(03:43):
say that full of neurons. Yeah, someone's gonna go be
that now. Yes. So as as at the basis of
all of this is the is the neurotransmitter, right, yes,
which is an electrochemical compound that depending on what kind
of neuron is excited or what what compound is passed
from synaps to synaps, right, you're going to have a

(04:04):
different kind of experience. But all these experiences are based
on these electrochemical reactions in in your neural networks. So
you have one one neuron exciting another and they become
connected and it goes on and on, and then you
have a neural network that's associated with fear or fear
of bears. More specifically, you see a bear and it's
excited because you stored this neural network as a memory,

(04:27):
and that's consciousness, that's being alive. As they say, right,
it kind of takes the mystery out of life to
a certain extent. An you think, yeah, but it also
and that's a great set up too for this and also, um,
you know, as long as you can measure that and
you can measure those brain waves that means there's something
going on there, right, because we have we do have
machines called electro en cephalographs e g s that measure

(04:50):
the electrical activity in your head, and we've determined science
has come to agree that there's a strong enough correlation
between somebody going, hey, why is this thing on my
head um and electrical activity while it's happening that when
we detect this electrical activity, we're saying this person is conscious, right,
right right, And that is a great way to set

(05:11):
up a study that was performed in the Netherlands. He's
wacky Dutch at the red red bowed. I'm sure that's
not pronounced correctly. I would say rod Bood rod Bood
University and the Netherlands in the nes h it's that word.
I know. It's a lot of nitten him, nimigan, nimogen,

(05:33):
nije m. That's what I'm going with. And that's one
of the easier looking Dutch towards us to go over
their aunt's crazy. Um. So they did this. You know
when you when you work with lab rats that sometimes
you have to put them to death. And what they
do is they chump their little heads off because they
you know, that's a quicken, speedy way to to kill something.
So they thought, you know, we might want to do

(05:54):
some test to see if this is actually a humane
way of doing this, which is what they thought it
all along, which is why they decapitate rats and other
lab animals, is because it's assumed that's humane. These Dutch
researchers saying, well, wait a minute, is it. Let's find
out I would think smothering one with a tiny pillow
while petting it, Yeah, while stroking it. I've thought about
that too. But fear, Yeah, sure, because I think we

(06:18):
should probably define humane here. Humane is probably the absence
of fear and pain. It's a humane way to kill
something on purpose. Yeah right, those are probably the two
things I would want cut out of my death, fear
and pain. So um, they did this. They performed these
tests on rats, attached them to the little e g s,
cut off their heads, and they found that the brain

(06:39):
continue to operate uh generate electrical activity between thirteen and
a hundred hurts frequency, which is that means thought and consciousness, right,
study of electrical activity in the brain. We found that
within that band, that frequency band, those frequent stands that's
when you're thinking and feeling and saying, what is going on? Right?

(07:00):
Why is my lifeless body over there without my head on? Right?
For about four seconds and then lights out? Yeah, lights out?
And then I think after about another fifty seconds or
something forty or fifty seconds, there was one last burst.
It wasn't exactly lights back on. It was like the
the end of everything in one last point. But there

(07:21):
was nothing between those that indicated consciousness. It was just
like everything was gone after about fifty seconds, but four
seconds consciousness, which brings us to capital punishment capital. Uh.
The way they came up with that originally is from
the Latin term cut put um, which means head. So
decapitation was where capital punisiments derived from decapitation. That's exactly right.

(07:44):
And so now we can talk about humans losing their heads.
Well yeah, because as we said, um, a humane way
of executing something or dispatching something um is to take
fear and pain out of it, right. Yeah. And this,
this study of these rats suggests that hold on. I
want everybody to do this, right. I want you to

(08:06):
look around, to think, to feel, to listen. Well, I
count four seconds off you're ready? One, two, three, four,
took a lot in just then, didn't you a lot
more than I'd be comfortable taking in with my head
not attached to my body exactly. So here's the This
is why the rat the rat study is so disturbing

(08:28):
because it suggests that after your head is cut off,
you are still very much aware of what's going on
and can think and feel and be terrified. Right, yes,
and you know I read. I wish I had a
better source for this, but I did find one doctor
that firmly believes that there's a lot of pain associated
with a decapitation. Execution by decapitation, maybe not for long,

(08:50):
but he's like, I don't know about this painless thing,
right well, and long before um this Dutch study was published, people,
people have long suspected like this, you're still conscious after
you're decapitated for a little while. Right, let's talk about
decapitation first. I want to give a shout out to
our buddy Alan Bellows from Damn Interesting, who wrote a
great article as well. You know him that, Um, yeah,

(09:12):
he he emails with us sometimes, Okay, yeah, um, he
wrote one called lucid decapitation that I used this source
for this. It's great. I read that today too. Yes,
um so, chuck, let's let's do talk about a history
of head loss as it were, and not losing one's
head isn't losing one's cool. No, do you mean Chopper style,
although you do probably lose your cool when you lose

(09:34):
your head and you're still conscious. We'll find out. Uh
in the biblical uh apocrypha, I love that word. Uh.
There's a widow named Judith. She cut off the head
of an Assyrian general name Holofer needs and uh he
was he was a bad guy, laying seized her town.
She cut his head off. Romans just sduced him and

(09:54):
then cut his head off. Well, that's the way to
do it, especially if you're a biblical widow. Right. The
Romans did that to um their own because they thought
it was a better and more painless way than crucifixion,
which they did to outsiders, which is not a very
nice way to die. I'm at evil Europe obviously all
kinds of people from the ruling class, the peasants. And

(10:15):
uh today it still happens in a few Middle Eastern countries. Yeah, Qatar,
Yemen ran, most prominently Saudi Arabia. Seeing what was the
fahrenheight nine eleven. There's footage of like a um, somebody
being beheaded in public and Saudi Arabia and like the
late nineties, did they use the sword? Yeah, I really yep,

(10:37):
the schmidtar and Josh, they're also the extra judicial judicial um,
like when you know, a journalist is captured and beheaded
by a group of guerrillas, and that's not like they
don't use a sword or a guillotine. Is really gruesome, Yes,
it's extremely gruesome. That's right. That's why um, most modern
cultures UM have come to the conclusion that beheading is

(11:01):
um extremely barbaric. It's an extremely painful way to die
and I imagine probably one of the more terrifying ways
to die too. UM. But it took a while for
everybody to come to that conclusion, right, Yeah, And you
mentioned Saudi Arabia is one of the main countries they
they have Uh, I guess you would call very qualified
swordsman to do this, but other places they're not so

(11:24):
qualified and it doesn't go as smoothly. Sometimes there's like
some chopping has to go on, which is not ideal.
And one of the reasons why um it is an
ideal is because it takes chopping, or it did for
many many centuries, because you had to either do it
with a knife, which was really like not a beheading.
It was more cutting someone's head off over the course

(11:46):
of a few minutes probably, or you could try to
behead somebody with an axe or a sword, and those
are the two favored implements used for state sanctioned executions. Right.
But like you said, some cultures like Saudi Arabia today,
you have to be um, you're a very highly trained,
highly skilled headsman, is what it's called. Um. In other cultures,

(12:09):
you could have also doubled as the guy who like
pulled the lever on the gallows and you had no
extra training. Maybe you've done it once before, maybe you hadn't.
So for the most part, when you were beheaded, most
likely it was going to take more than one blow,
and um, you're going to feel it. Yes, then everything changed. Yes,

(12:30):
the guillotine, Yes, chuck him. The fact of well one
of the facts of this, uh this podcast. Yeah, I've
always heard, and I think a lot of people have
always heard. The guillotine was named after Joseph Guillotine, the
inventor of the guillotine. He was not the inventor of
the guillotine. No, it was named after him. It was
named after him, But he was not the invitor. He
was the champion of the guillotine as a humane method

(12:53):
of execution. Yeah he was. He a doctor, Yeah he was.
He was a French physician of the revolution. Um. Another
doctor named Antoine Louis was the one who actually invented it,
and Joseph Ignas guillotine Um had a lot more power
in Cloud and said, this invention is awesome. It's going
to allow us to kill people more humanely but also

(13:17):
more quickly. And that actually led inadvertently, if you know,
the guillotine started out to be a humane method of execution,
UM to what's called the Reign of Terror. Yeah. I
think you said thirty thousand people, uh, hit the guillotine
in one year, in less than a year, actually, in
thirty thousand is one of the lower estimates of it.
I've seen up to like fifty or sixty thousand people.

(13:39):
It's just like they're like, oh, great, well, here's a
machine of execution and we're going to basically turn it
into the end of the assembly line. Yeah. It's you know,
for those of you who don't know what a guillotine
is a little odd because they're all over the place
and cartoons even in in pop culture. But it's a
big it's a tall, like fourteen ft tall at the

(14:01):
at the top, yes, fourteen, and it and it drops
a large blade that's held in a track, so it
goes straight down. How have you? So the blade, the
blade itself has a weight at the top, you can see,
it's like an iron bar. And then the angle blade
right diagonal blade. They those two things combined way about
a hundred seventy The mouton is the weight. Yeah, So

(14:24):
this puppy slides down very fast at fourteen from fourteen
feet in its track very precisely gets the back of
your neck. It's very sharp, and that generally means your
head will probably just fall straight down into the little
peach basket right ideally right now, if you are um,
if you were beheaded prior to the invention of the guillotine,
right this podcast, And also I have to say, like

(14:47):
you're you're right, everybody knows what a guillotine looks like
to a certain extent. It wasn't until I wrote this
and was doing research for it that I really actually
looked at the actual guillotine, the whole assembly, right, I mean,
look at that thing. That monster is horrific, and it's
like that's used by the state, and that's how you

(15:09):
are going to die. You're going to lose your head.
And Victor Hugo famously said that, um, a person can
have a certain indifference on the death penalty as long
as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes,
which is I think very true. It's pretty easy to
talk a tough game about things like this until you
actually see it go down exactly. So yeah, So the

(15:30):
guillotine what it does is knows most notably is it
deprives your brain of oxygen and blood right your your
circulatory system. It's a closed system, right, so it's it's
based on um pressure. Your heart is pumping the blood
throughout the body. It passes by, the lungs drops off
c O two, which you exhale, It takes in oxygen,

(15:51):
which you inhale, and then the whole thing goes again. Right,
as long as the system is closed and the hearts,
the hearts beating, and the lungs are transferring, um uh,
you're fine. Once you take a head off. You have
opened this closed system, and eventually the heart's going to
just pump everything out of the neck and whatever was

(16:12):
in the head at that time is going to come out,
and the brain, starved of oxygen and blood, starts to
degrade very quickly. It's processes start to degrade right now.
If you are at the hands of a hack literally
headsman right who doesn't notice do and he's got a
blunt blade, he's hungover, who knows he's gonna take your

(16:34):
head off. It's good. It's gonna take a few what
is the disco I okay, it's gonna take it's gonna
take a few um hacks, and you're going to bleed out,
probably before your head comes off. Not so with the guillotine.
It is that very precise. It comes right down, It

(16:55):
takes your head right off, and then there's a little
wooden shield to make sure that it doesn't go flying
into the crowd. Instead, it maybe hits the shield and
it bounces into the basket where a headsman can hold
it up. Yeah, or sometimes throw it into the crowd.
Didn't know they did that? Interesting, and sometimes they would
be big jerks in the case a very famous case

(17:16):
of Charlotte Corday, she who was executed in France in
sevente because she assassinated a revolutionary leader named Jean Paul
Melaw and the jerk executioner picked up her head and
smacked her around in a little bit. Yeah, he got
eleven years in prison for it too. And people who
witnessed this say that her expression on her headless head,

(17:40):
I'm sorry, her head, bodiless head, her dismembered headed, good lord,
uh showed unequivocal marks of indignation. So she actually had
a facial expression of like, how dare you slap me? Right?
And it wasn't like from from what I understand, it
wasn't like that's how she looked when she when he

(18:02):
picked her head up. Yeah, there was a change. It
was after he smacked her, like her cheeks flushed and
she basically went into a rage right before she died.
He had eleven years for that. Interesting, Yeah, the French
did not You did not screw around. You didn't do that.
That was a huge lapse in humanity taste. Yeah, cut
off the heads fine smacking around. Well again, remember that

(18:23):
this is this is the time, this is sevente France
officially adopted the guillotine in seventeen two and used it
until nineteen seventy seven. Yeah, that was the last guy
to have his head cut off by the French state.
It was a I believe, a rapist, murderer, UM immigrant
who hit death row. And then three years after that,
France was like, We're done with the death penalties. It

(18:44):
isn't the crazy people were like partying in studio sixty
four fifty four with their disco eyes sixty four. Where
in the world did that come from? So yeah, and
then all of a sudden in France are cutting people's
heads off. Still right, but again remember they adopted it
the year before. This guy smacks Charlotte Corday's the year
after they adopted it, and people are like, uh, I

(19:04):
don't think that's supposed to happen. So from that that
moment on, and probably before that because Chuck there there
have been other um instances of people in history who
had their heads taken off skillfully. Um. For example, ambole
In King Charles the first they had their heads taken skillfully,
and both of them were reported to try to have

(19:26):
to try to speak like they were moving their lips
and their eyes were moving. Right. This is not funny,
it's just it's insane. Yeah, I'm not laughing because I
think this is funny. And there's a huge debate that's
become increasingly one sided in favor of what we're talking
about today. Um. The other side is, well, this is

(19:49):
just like ghost electrical activity. Yeah, like you prick a
frog ten minutes after this dissected, and they're still going
to move. They have that stimulant or Marshall Brain has
that very popular post on the blogs about sprinkling salt
on frog's legs and making a move. Really truly, you've
seen it. I don't think you have to check it out.
And that's crazy. Yeah. Um, but yes, So that's if

(20:13):
you cut a leg off or you cut an arm off. Yeah,
that's remnant electrical activity. It's the same thing in the head.
It's still electrical activity. The problem is you don't experience
pain and fear and terror in your arm. Your arm
feels absolutely nothing. All sensations that we experience, whether it

(20:34):
it's our arm being cut off or you know, feeling
terror at seeing our arm cut off, all of that
is in the head. So when you decapitate, the head
and there's still electrical activity, the chances are that it
is conscious experience. Yeah, your brain has It's not like
your head got bashed in. Your brain is very much intact. Yes,

(20:54):
it's just not attached to the lower half and it
still has plenty of oxygen and plenty of blood to
deliver that oxygen for a few seconds. And that's what's required.
As long as your brain hasn't suffered any damage, as
long as um you have oxygen, you have blood, you
are likely going to experience consciousness. And this is pretty
much the conclusion that that people have arrived at, Like, yeah,

(21:15):
if you cut someone's head off cleanly and quickly, they're
going to know what's going on for a little while afterwards. Yeah,
and how long is very much up for debate. They've
tested or not tested, but they've seen evidence and other
mammals up to like a half a minute. Yeah. Chickens
are very famous for running around the barnyard with no
heads for a little while. Do you ever hear the

(21:35):
story of Mike the headless chicken for a very long
time in Mike's case, eighteen months, But Mike the headless chicken,
And if you're interested in that, type in Mike the
headless chicken, how stuff works, and it will bring up
some things here. They're including a blog post I wrote
on it. But his he was different because the farmer
missed his brainstem, and chickens are almost all brainstem. But
Mike lived like an extra eighteen months actually in good

(21:59):
juicy breast and exactly. And he choked on a colonel
of corn. That's how Mike died, after having his healthy
feeding it though with a dropper. Okay, well that makes sense.
Let's tell some more stories, anecdotal stories about people living
and making faces after their head has been cut off, okay,
because those are interesting. In nineteen nine, an army veteran

(22:19):
was in a car crash with um a friend. His
friend was decapitated sadly, and he saw looked at his
friend's face not attached to his body, and saw a
distinct change in expression from he says, quote first of
shock and confusion and then terror or grief. It's horrific.
It is horrific. You mentioned Ambo Lennon King Charles Um

(22:43):
there was there was one story, a very dubious one
that's not in his biographies, but Antoine la Vossier in
seventeen ninety four, apparently agreed to try and blink for
as long as he could afterwards. Yeah. He was a
French chemist around the time of the revolution, right, Yeah,
so he reportedly blinked for about fifteen to twenty seconds.

(23:04):
But there's there was also another murderer name uh Larcennaire
who said, all right, I'm gonna wink at everyone after
my head's cut off if I can. He didn't wink. Um,
there is one. There is an account that is not dubious.
It's probably the um most scientific observations of you know,

(23:26):
consciousness following decapitation. Ever, Um, it's very famous and it
is verified as far as I know. In n five,
a guy named Dr Boreo right basically got permission to
study the decapitated head of a murderer named on Relong
Wheel right and Um, so he was right there, right

(23:50):
at head level when line Wheels head came off. This
plan in place, I assume he immediately picks up the
head and starts experimenting on it. And over the course
of thirty seconds, the physician basically he said longuil and
long will opened his eyes and focused them his head
just his head focused them on Dr. Barrio and then

(24:12):
kind of like faded out again, and then doctor said
long Guil, and Long Guil opened his eyes again and
focused them, he says, undeniably focused them on the doctor's
eyes again, and then he tried it a third time
and then nothing. So that was his plan. Was yelled
his name. I guess it worked, but it did work.
He said that he his observations were that this that
this this decapitated head went from its eyes closed or

(24:36):
glazed over to you know, consciousness coming back into it
and focusing its eyes on him. Because as a response
to his name being called, yeah, and German researcher st summering,
this is the worst one. If he he said that,
um he he that was a physician inspecting ahead and

(24:57):
poked the spinal canal with his finger, and that the
head the person grimaced horribly and they grind their teeth.
So it's almost as if the head was saying, I
know you think I'm dead, but that really really hurts. Yeah.
The spinal canal is where your spinal cord is in
your spine, so you would think that there was a

(25:18):
little bit left because he was poking up into the
spinal cord with his finger, and I can't imagine the
excruciating pain that that would cause. Well, the doctor I
found that said that he thought it was decidedly painful,
That's what he said. He's like, you can't expose and
cut the spine like that without there being a lot
of pain. Yeah, And that was st simmering right in

(25:38):
arguing in the French newspapers to stop cutting people's heads off. Well,
they listened a little less than two hundred years later.
So I think the answer to this one is yes,
you stay conscious after your head is cut off from
your body, at least for several seconds. That's right, right,

(25:58):
well done, sir, Thank you, sir. Good article. Uh. If
you want to learn more, you should search for stuff.
You should know how stuff works in your search engine,
and it should bring up our brand spanking new, beautiful
looking stuff you should know homepage. Yeah, we got a
little fan page now that uh looks like a proper
fan page. Yeah, and we we decide what's on it, right,

(26:18):
we say, hey, here's some cool articles you guys should
check out. Here's some articles based on some of our
favorite podcasts, image galleries, quizzes, just basically everything. Like it's
like they gave a portion of the site to us,
and we're doing some cool stuff with it. How about that?
So um, you'll be able to find that there right indeed?
Okay um? And yeah, wow, I didn't say search bar.

(26:40):
Just type the capitation into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com and that will probably bring up
some cool stuff, including this that sounds like a practical joke.
Just type the capitation and and see what happens. It
brings up nothing but rabbits. And since I said search bar,
listener man, Josh, I'm gonna call this little poem from

(27:02):
Alex our fan. And Alex's birthday is a today. Happy birthday, dude,
Happy birthday Alex. You know you're timing there, buddy. Yeah,
and this is his twenty one birthday. And I hope
he has a strong stomach girl, else he was never
going to hear this, that's right. Alex is in a
creative writing class and he writes poems and lots of them. Well,

(27:24):
he says, I write nothing but poems, even though I'm
a guy. Yes, Josh, he is a guy, but he
is a poet. A strange thing to say, renaissance man. Recently,
I was listening to how fossils work and saunas more
interesting than you think. And I wrote this poem about
the podcast, sleeping in my bed, trying to absorb unique
facts about different topics, dreaming of a fossil forming, a

(27:47):
young Josh smoking, and an older Chuck laughing at dirty
Chuck's I'm not sure what that means, understanding now that
reading about saunas requires you to strip. Having this podcast
allows me to own a piece of history. I'm sorry,
I own a piece of unique history, learning about different

(28:08):
parts of human life, healing over and laughter at the jokes.
You are reading this like William Shatner reads poetry. I
am now I know why people own eye products to
listen to Josh and Chuck w talk about talk and
joke around. I hope you like it, and I hope
you like you're part of the poem. I don't remember. No,

(28:30):
it's not because that'd be weird. So the whole high
end all my poems with hope you like that. Yeah,
but you know the first letter of each line spells
out stuff you should know. Oh you didn't know that.
That's why I was reading it like Shatner, having would
be the h oh you didn't know that, even points

(28:50):
out if you still don't get it, read the first
letter of each line. So very creative, and even Joe
didn't get it. Thanks a lot, Alex. Happy birthday to you,
all right, Chuck. Indeed, probably shouldn't ask for any decapitation
stories or poems. Yeah, I know, poems. You don't get
any ideas from this. This, this is just special, all right.

(29:12):
If you have an unusual pet that is not a ferret,
because it's not unusual any longer, Um, we want to
hear about it. If you have taken an animal from
the wild and tamed it to be your pet or
possibly do your bidding, we want to hear stories about that. Okay,
send it in an email to Stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. For moral this and thousands of

(29:38):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
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