A man lies in a coma between life and death, illustrating cutting-edge research into what happens at the moment of death.
Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.
ARAKAWA AND MADELINE GINS HAVE LET IT BE KNOWN THAT THEY HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE. THIS DECISION WAS PLASTERED ON THE COVER OF THEIR GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM CATALOGUE (1997).
Arakawa, a Japanese-born conceptual artist and designer, who with his wife, Madeline Gins, explored ideas about mortality by creating buildings meant to stop aging and preclude death, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 73.
THE SCIENTIST follows a brilliant physicist, Dr. Marcus Ryan (Bill Sage), who anguishes over the tragic death of his wife and daughter while secretly constructing a mysterious energy generator in his basement. The multi—dimensional energy unleashed by the machine triggers a series of events that propels Ryan toward a higher level of consciousness.
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday
In 2008, historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS is a progressive motor-neuron disease that causes the central nervous system to degenerate. Over time, patients lose the ability to move their bodies, but retain full control over their minds. Judt describes the effects of the disease as "progressive imprisonment without parole."
As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the psychologist’s fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “stage theory” of grief captured the popular imagination, but the reality can be far messier and tenacious.
P.M.H. Atwater is a global leader in the study of the NDE. She dedicates her life to investigate and report near-death phenomena using a systematic, scientific method. Through her efforts, medical workers who routinely deal with trauma and emergencies are now recognizing and recording the near-death experience and sharing them. In 2001, the medical journal Lancet reported on the near-death experience, for the first time citing the work of Atwater to the global medical community. This book is the culmination of her life-long work and is written to be a sourcebook for doctors, nurses, EMTs, and anyone who has experienced either first hand or through a loved one the life-altering near-death phenomenon.
All lovers of existentialism will enjoy Becker's treatment of life and death. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for this work when it was first published in 1974. He certainly writes as one who understands the darkness of human life. Becker's thesis is that human personality and behavior has its deepest roots in our denying our death (thus the title). By this he means not only our death itself, but all of the horrors associated with our mortality as human beings. Becker makes frequent reference to Otto Rank, and reiterates Rank's point that all human cultural creation is inevitably religious in nature. There is also a wonderful treatment of Freud which will be especially refreshing to all those nauseated by modern attempts to dress up Freud's theories and make them appear more optimistic than they are, as well as a discussion of Freud's breaks with Jung and others.
The Ernest Becker Foundation (EBF) seeks to illuminate how the unconscious denial of mortality profoundly influences human behavior, giving rise to acts of hate and violence as well as noble, altruistic striving. The goal of the Foundation is to foster a deeper understanding of our creative, heroic, often destructive quest to ensure immortality.
The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.
Hailed by many viewers as a "life-transformational film," Flight from Death uncovers death anxiety as a possible root cause of many of our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level.
In a mere 90 pages, Tyler Volk’s book Death brilliantly depicts the biology and psychology of its subject, putting death in proper perspective as an integral component of the life cycle. I’ve read many insightful books about death, but if I were to recommend one book to help someone come to terms with death, this would be it.
Fascinated by this exponential increase in death rates, I recalled reading about the Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality, and how the probability of dying doubles fairly evenly every eight years. What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
This paper critiques the widespread secular misunderstanding of death as a plunge into oblivion. It uses a thought experiment about personal identity similar to those concocted by British philosopher Derek Parfit in his tour de force Reasons and Persons. By degrees, the reader is supposed to see that the notion of a blank or emptiness following death is incoherent, and that therefore we should not anticipate the end of experience when we die. This conclusion has a bit of a mystical feel to it, even though the premises are naturalistic.
ll living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead?
"We thought even the lifelessness was something that she would come out of," the mother said. "Everything for us is about faith. It is about trusting in God. We either believe in God's word or we don't." A pediatric expert on diabetes told the jury Monday that even right before her death, doctors might have been able to save the girl's life had she been brought to a hospital.
Read this report from 1905. The report is written by Dr Beaurieux, who under perfect circumstances experimented with the head of Languille, guillotined at 5.30 a.m. on June 28th, 1905
a man watches his life pass before him
Sitting in his office at the New School, professor and author Simon Critchley is laying out the crux of his latest book. “To learn how to die is to learn how to live—that’s the argument in a nutshell,” the 48-year-old writer says with enthusiasm and a British accent (he was raised in Liverpool). “It seems odd, but if you don’t accept mortality, life becomes meaningless—a flat line.”
Rich people dying before midnight on July 1, 1979, were to be taxed at up to 28 per cent of the value of their estates. But those who saved their final breath for the new financial year were free to die untaxed. Mr Leigh, of The Australian National University, and Professor Gans of the Melbourne Business School, discovered a large blip in the data as rich people postponed their deaths to the new financial year. "Over half of those who would have paid the inheritance tax in its last week of operation managed to avoid doing so," they state in their paper, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths?
A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments.
There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?
Hailed by many viewers as a "life-transformational film," Flight from Death uncovers death anxiety as a possible root cause of many of our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level
The theory builds from the assumption that the capability of self-reflection and the consciousness of one’s own mortality can be regarded as a continuous source for existential anguish. This "irresolvable paradox" is created from the desire to preserve life and the realization of that impossibility (because life is finite).
How does an atheist prepare for death? This is a theme Diana Athill explores in “Somewhere Towards the End.” Her grapplings are impressive: “My own belief — that we, on our short-lived planet, are part of a universe simultaneously . . . ordinary . . . and incalculably mysterious . . . — does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter. It feels like a state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable — not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true.”
This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. The work by German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta, who recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, reveals much about dying - and living.
WHEN IS A person dead -- or dead enough? The question has long influenced decisions about when it's appropriate to end medical treatment for people who are hopelessly ill. However, a quieter debate has simmered for years about how the concept of death informs the practice of organ transplantation.
This is my position on the afterlife: I don’t know and you don’t either. If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we would not fear death as we do, we would not mourn quite so agonizingly the death of loved ones, and there would be no need to engage in debates on the subject.
Sleeping, Dreaming, And Dying is an exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama edited and narrated by Francisco Varela. Sleeping, Dreaming, And Dying is the account of an historic dialogue between leading Western scientists and one of the foremost representatives of Buddhism today, the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Revolving around the three key moments of consciousness of sleep, dreams, and death.
500 people say what their believe in the afterlife is.
I think its funny to note that while Jim Holt alleges the existence of some impeccably credentialed scientists who believe in an afterlife, he does not name them, cite them, or otherwise support this claim.
Where does this leave those who, while secular in outlook, still pine after immortality? A little more than a century ago, the American philosopher William James proposed an interesting way of keeping open the door to an afterlife. We know that the mind depends on the physical brain, James said. But that doesn’t mean that our brain processes actually produce our mental life, as opposed to merely transmitting it. Perhaps, he conjectured, our brains allow our minds to filter through to this world from some transcendent “mother sea” of consciousness. Had James given his lecture a few decades later, he might have used the radio as a metaphor. When a radio is damaged, the music becomes distorted. When it is smashed, the music stops altogether. All the while, however, the signal is still out there, uncorrupted.
The problem is, death keeps looking at us. When I'm forced to think about this, what I see most clearly are the faces of patients at the moment they recognized the incredible fact that they were going to die soon. This is what I can't forget: the look they had as they read the writing on the wall like Belshazzar did at his feast in the Bible story, faced at the height of his power with the message that he was about to die. Just what people see as they read that message is, I suspect, the most important fact about death. I know that fact escapes my grasp, but I keep reaching for it, all the same.
The main goal is to provide a suitable scientific platform to discuss all topics related to human death, end-of-life dilemmas, and disorders of consciousness.
A page long interview with Hofstadter, some very poignant and sad comments about the death of his wife.
