What happens if you die instantly?

Answer

Dear,

What you say doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. The vast majority of people undergo a decline in consciousness before dying (coma), so for most dying is an unconscious process. For those who consciously experience onset of death (cessation of circulation), such as a shot to the head, a lethal arrhythmia (an arrhythmia of the heart), a rider’s embolism (a type of obstruction that blocks an artery or capillary), a brain haemorrhage… it depends on whether the circulatory arrest is experienced consciously or not. A person with intact brain function can feel for a few seconds that they are dying – that something is very seriously wrong. The look in the eyes is difficult to describe: it is one of fear and wonder at the same time. In someone whose circulatory arrest is accompanied by deactivated cortical function (part of the brain function) due to a bleeding, for example, death occurs completely unconsciously. People with intact brain function at the moment the circulation stops – who are immediately resuscitated – very rarely (because they rarely recover) can remember, for example, that they were ‘beaten’ (precordial beat – a beat before the heartbeat). So in the examples you cite, it depends on whether the brain is immediately hit hard or not, with loss of consciousness or not. If not – and death occurs due to the rupture of, for example, a (very) large blood vessel, then death is experienced consciously as long as there is oxygen in the brain. One also speaks, for example, of the trimodal way of dying during trauma: either within the first 3 minutes, the first 3 hours or the first 3 days.

Best regards,

Dirk Danschieter, MSc