Give today's medical technology, is there any reason why, in theory, a human head could not be kept alive and conscious. I cannot see why not. As far as I know, all that would be needed is a pure blood supply.
Would the person be able to talk, hear and see? What about eating? Would the face age normally? etc. etc.
A person in this state would be little worse off than a quadraplegiac and should be able to cope mentally. If it is possible, it could be a way of extending the life of a person with a cancer-ridden body.
If it is possible, why has it not been done? (or has it?)
Please speculate on the above and any ethical implications
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The short answer is NO
A longer answer depends on how long and definition of alive and conscious.
Time < 1 microsecond -yes
-
in principle - perhaps. How much money do you want to spend?
aging - yes dementialdoes not depend on signals external to head
speaking - no no air for vocal cords
watch that blood. There is more there than red and white corpuscles.
Check out the account at the bottom of this Wiki article...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
Wow, what a question! And the link vertsyeux provided had a very creepy account.
I would guess none of us are trained in any medical field, so I suppose this is more a though experiment rather than a search for actual answers?
Supposedly, Russian scientists did this with a dog...removing its head and supplying it blood, keeping it alive long enough to do several tests its awareness. Video...er...*gulp*...here
Against my better judgment, I watched it. However, you see the dog sort of jump a bit when they smash a hammer near its head. If you have no body or neck, it's not likely you would able to move your head at all.
I would think the task would be more monumental than just supplying blood. You've got a brain fully disconnected from its nervous system, which could cause tremendous trauma. After all, your brain now can't send signals to the heart to beat or your lungs to breath...could that cause some sort of feedback loop forcing the brain to shut down?
Many amputees report tremendous pain in their 'phantom limbs', and use mirror therapy to reflect and stretch the remaining limb, tricking the brain into 'thinking' he missing limb is fine. Without a body, would similar pain persist, and could the brain be tricked into thinking it had a body?
But I suppose in theory, supplying nutrition, oxygen and fluid should be easy to do through the circulating blood. The voice box is pretty low, so you may not be able to get enough neck to be able to speak, even with some sort of respirator.
But let's say that you had a healthy budget, did thorough testing on animals (PETA would go ballistic), and figured out a way to sustain a living head...Futurama style. How many people would want that? What kind of life would that be? Are human beings really so afraid of death that they'll preserve themselves at any cost, even if it means being an inanimate object on a mantle? Would the people around you be comfortable with having a living head as a friend or family member?
Now, if you could attach it a robot body, Robocop style, I might sign up for that!
I don't see a reason why it theoretically couldn't be done.
You do have to worry about the psychological cost of the massive trauma that the victim, er, patient would suffer. It might be psychologically similar to complete paralysis, so it might not be completely hopeless.
The more you could make the life support system fake a body, the better the brain would be able to handle it. The brain would need to feel like it was still connected to the same neural control and feedback of the body's autonomous processes. Carry this out to the logical conclusion, and you've got the standard philosophical brain in a jar connected up to a computer simulating all of its perceptions. So it's possible that you could fool the patient into thinking he still had a full body.
Really, you theoretically can take any part of a person and make it survive independent of the rest of the person as long as you sufficiently simulate its contact and interface with everything around it. Physicality, chemistry, structure, fluid flow, neurology. Even an arbitrary piece of the brain, as long as you simulate the missing part of the brain, should be viable.
As far as aging normally, I don't see why it wouldn't. But if you have technology sufficient to support a severed head indefinitely, then you probably also are able to reduce or reverse (or for that matter accelerate) the aging process in anyone. Or physically reverse even the most pervasive cancer. Or reconstruct a lost body part.
hey i got a point i read this in anatomy of cockroach ........very interesting a cockroach can live without head and his head can live alone.....there r many reasons one is the loss of blood ....a cockroach does not have blood pressure and veins....so looses blood so slowly that in no time wound clots .....a cockroach dies due to lack of food...but in humans anatomy is totally different.....excessive loss of blood and there was someting i dot remember ....that brain controls body so if it does not have any function.....only head and cut off from spinal cord what can it do????? .....and cockroach brain did not play any significant roll in their body.....
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by: thinknirmalPosted on 2009-09-14 at 19:41:38ID: 25331280
I won't be able to answer. But I like your question :)