| >seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death. Who thinks this? Nobody thinks this. Literally and actually, irrefutably, not a single healthcare professional educated in the last 50 years makes this argument. I'm not even a healthcare professional I'm a healthcare amateur (volunteer EMT) and I have personally witnessed the "turbo-mode" the brain goes into as it desperately plays its last cards trying to keep itself alive. On multiple occasions. It's called agonal breathing. Your heart stops, your brain senses this, and it starts sending out every electrical signal possible to get your muscles spasming in the right order to restart breathing. It never works, but the brain tries. We always slap on a mask, pump as much oxygen into them as possible and start breathing for them and doing chest compressions but it almost never works. It can go on for a LONG time, not "moments". Someone might be obviously and permanently dead, and been that way for a half hour, and then their brainstem will find one last bit of energy somewhere and command the diaphragm and accessory muscles to take a final agonal breath thus scaring the shit out of everyone. The patient's body is dead, but their brain refuses to give up until it exhausts every single ATP molecule available to it, and then it too, finally, dies. The brain freaking the fuck out as it suffocates, shutting down various parts of itself to conserve energy until all that's left is the brainstem sending out reflexive, often garbled, commands to organs no longer capable of responding until it too dies isn't sign of a "soul". |