In an attempt to sift through rumor and incorrect information, I researched the pig brain experiment so you didn’t have to–but you so much should..
Here are the facts: A team of neuroscientists at Yale School of Medicine, led by Nenad Sestan, last week reported that they had managed to revive brains from pigs that had been decapitated in a slaughterhouse four hours earlier.
Here is the big massive big brain caveat: The brains did not start causing the decapitated heads to oink again.. and the brains did not come back to live in some weird hog frankenstein style .. No, the “revive” that countless media outlets are spinning into the pop-sci web is this: Many cells restarted normal metabolic functions, such as producing energy and removing waste. Some neurons even started firing. But there were no signs of the coordinated, brainwide electrical activity indicating sentience. The team had of anesthetics on hand in case brain activity did indicate consciousness.
So we are informed that conciseness never restarted.. that the pig brains just had some random neurons firing in electrical charges.
But they also had anesthetics on hand–just in case pain medicine was necessary. And that is where my freakout began.
I took a deep dive into this pig story before bed last night..even went back and re-listened to portions of Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis, where he did an entire show on this, calling it Frankenswine and comparing it to Pet Semetary.
The biggest thing to me was the anesthesia that could have been needed if the brain felt pain… IF, just if.. the brain came back alive in the severed head and felt the trauma of getting the head cut off all over again….
My nightmare began there.
While sleeping, this dream sequence occurred.. I will relay it the best I can, as dreams so often get murky minutes after you stop trying to remember them.
In my dream, the world suddenly found out that this pig experiment actually caused pigs to feel pain again–and then somehow science began doing the same experimentation on human beings. Then a dramatic announcement came by scientists and religious figures at the same press conference, where it was told to the public that when you die, regardless of how you behaved on the planet, you will feel the feeling you had at death for the rest of eternity. If you died from a heart attack, you will experience a heart attack for the rest of eternity.. a car crash, the same.. cancer.. pain.. Bones being crushed by heavy equipment… eternal suffering. At this point, it was recommended that people begin choosing a painless method of death at the time they wanted to expire. However people driving to their “Kevorkian” style ending began getting in car crashes–causing panic–and people began clamoring for mass suicides… Church leaders and government officials introduced a plan to gas the entire planet…
And then I woke up.
In a cold sweat of sorts.. And out of sorts mentally..
All this from a fine swine prior to sleep.. the netherworld of dreamland got pretty awful.
X X X
It was that anesthetics comment that got me..
The notion that the pain of death comes back again if the brain starts firing in a severed head.
And then… the rest is the future, baby.
One last thing to remember…
PIG BRAIN IS A DELICACY IN TAWIAN STREET FOOD TRADITION.
OINK OINK.
