#alecguinness — Public Fediverse posts

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…

The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…

Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.

Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”

While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.

“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.

* Haruki Murakami

###

As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.

Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.

Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…

The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…

Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.

Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”

While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.

“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.

* Haruki Murakami

###

As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.

Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.

Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…

The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…

Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.

Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”

While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.

“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.

* Haruki Murakami

###

As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.

Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.

Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…

The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…

Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.

Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”

While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.

“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.

* Haruki Murakami

###

As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.

Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.

Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source