how do people die instantly?

Question

You typically see people deteriorating and stop breathing or fall into a state of unconsciousness – this seems steady. But when you read of freak accidents like being decapitated internally (the spinal cord detaching from the head), how do you just die instantly? If the brain can survive 6 minutes without oxygen until pronounced brain dead…how does someone just die? Even if your heart stops beating there and then, how do you just drop dead?

Edit: thanks!

In: 89

Answer 1

“instant death” is something that doesn’t really make sense to talk about. We are not a single living entity, we’re an amalgam of dozens of systems and uncountable living cells that all qualify as being “alive” independently, many of which aren’t even “us” in a genetic sense, but are symbiotic relationships with other microbiology and equally vital to systems working.

So, we pick something to identify as “death”, for medical purposes and ease of discussion: often, this is “brain death”/lack of detectable brain activity. Otherwise it may be “point of no return” at which enough systems are in unrecoverable failure that the only direction is down (eg, heart explodes, head gets severed, entire body gets crushed). In these cases, many systems may still function for quite a while, and even the majority of living cells may remain alive for a long time, but the “human entity” is unrecoverable and considered dead. The brain may still fire nerves, but if there’s no body to receive them, it doesn’t make much sense to call the person “alive”.

Tldr: “death” is a fuzzy boundary, not a clear line. Depending on what specific function you’re comparing against, systems may slowly fall apart, or may experience sudden catastrophic failure from trauma. But even in cases of sudden and extreme bodily destruction, some definitions of “life” persist for a time.

To address your examples, the “drop dead” is often “sudden loss of consciousness” or “sudden loss of bodily control”. These are indistinguishable from death to an observer, and if it’s a catastrophic accident, likely “the rest of death” (brain death, full system shut down, etc) is likely to occur before consciousness returns (because it never does), making it relatively meaningless to distinguish the two points of “decapitated” and “brain dead”.