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Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Ep46 "Who says you're dead?"

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

iHeartPodcasts

Mental Health, Science, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education

4.6524 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Can a person be declared legally dead even though he is very much alive? In December of 2010, why did a number of families choose to pull their loved ones off life support just before the new year? How do doctors decide when you've died, and how is it different from how lawyers decide? How is death a process rather than an event? What does any of this have to do with getting buried alive, your family's religious beliefs, or whether a head stays alive after the guillotine? Join Eagleman and guest Jacob Appel, an emergency room psychiatrist and head of ethics, for an episode about the science and the questions about death -- including who's domain it is to call it, and where this is all heading.

Transcript

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0:00.0

How do you know when a person is dead?

0:05.0

I mean, it seems like a straightforward problem, but this is often a very complex issue,

0:13.0

both medically and legally. Because as we'll see in this episode, death is not an event, but a process. So where do the medical and legal systems

0:24.3

face off against one another in this question? Can a person be declared legally dead, even though

0:31.0

he's very much alive? Why in 2011 did an enormous number of families choose to pull their loved ones off life support

0:39.7

just before the new year. And what does this have to do with getting buried alive or with

0:45.3

your family's religious beliefs or whether someone's head stays alive after the guillotine?

0:54.8

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

0:57.7

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford,

1:00.6

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

1:04.3

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

1:18.4

Yeah. Our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about the science, the ethics, and the questions about the end of life.

1:25.9

What qualifies as death? Who gets to say that you are dead? And what is the

1:32.1

future of this? Okay, so let's start with something that's perhaps macabre and unexpected.

1:39.0

But if you're a modern adult and you die suddenly, you have all these bill pay and credit card payments and

1:46.3

automatic withdrawals that are scheduled, and your finances might keep on trucking for a while.

1:52.6

You may even receive some auto deposits into your bank account, and with all the

1:56.7

comings and goings, it would look to someone who didn't know that you're still making transactions.

2:02.5

And if you happened to have some pre-scheduled emails that you'd previously written, those might go

2:08.0

out and various legal things get triggered at different points. And it will probably look for a little

2:13.4

while like you're still making stuff happen in the world. And I was thinking about this

2:19.1

the other day as an analogy to what happens with your biology. Generally speaking, death is

...

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