7 Myths About Your Brain

MYTH #3: Your brain keeps working after you get decapitated
Back when the guillotine was all the rage, execution witnesses claimed that severed heads exhibited signs of life such as blinking, looking around, and even speaking. But modern docs attribute the reactions to the reflexive twitching of muscles rather than to any sort of deliberate, conscious action. Once the head is cut off from its oxygen supplier, the heart, the brain goes into a coma and begins to die. Consciousness — the relationship between the mind and the world around it — is basically lost immediately.