Guillotine Deaths Were Way Creepier Than We Thought

Decapitation by guillotine was popular during the French Revolution, and was thought to be a merciful method of execution. Believed for centuries to be instantaneous and thereby humane, even the most gentle option of the day,  for some time the guillotine was used exclusively on nobility for offenses like treason.

But over time, observations of victims’ faces by medical personnel and witnesses to the moment of decapitation led to doubts about the interpretation of instantaneous death. The eyes of severed heads appeared to follow or seek out those of the living, respond to spoken names, even form emotional expressions. Often, physical indications appeared identical to those of life.

Was the belief about immediate loss of consciousness mistaken? Could it be possible that victims of beheading experience decapitation before the mercy of death? And if so, how long could such horror be perceived?

True awareness is unlikely

Observations of physical responses resembling consciousness sometimes continued for up to fifteen seconds — an eternity, if you think about it, for anyone going through the experience. But recent studies of consciousness show that generating the conscious a state we associate with perceptions of reality and the world around us is too demanding metabolically to persist without blood flow for more than, well, a heartbeat or two.

So intensive are the brain’s processing requirements to establish of this state of alert awareness that the cessation of blood flow that occurs in decapitation — total and instantaneous — probably stops processing cold. Along with the brutal shock to the neurological system, such brutal decapitation probably does render meaningful interpretation in the moment impossible, as well as painless… a mercy indeed.

The moments preceding the descent of the blade would also likely have been flooded by stress hormones and chemicals (like adrenaline and cortisol), causing extreme physical responses by an amplified flight-or-fight response with nowhere to go. Experience of vision, time, and details would be distorted, complicating the consciousness cocktail further beforehand.

Expressions and movements of the face and eyes are more likely to be a result of the neuroelectrical chaos wreaking havoc before the blade falls, and certainly at the moment of separation… convulsions of muscles in death, not emotions of a fading life.

History, thankfully

France held its final guillotining in the 20th century making the guillotine a relic of the past.  Decapitation isn’t practiced today as a method of execution (except in a few areas of the Middle East, under dramatically different circumstances), so the question is a moot one. Even so, definitively putting to bed a persistent scientific curiosity with current understanding of neurology sheds welcome light on a truly macabre issue… a mercy for those asking the questions as well as for the unfortunate souls who answered them.