In september 2023, Elon Musk's Neuralink announced that it was looking for volunteers for human clinical trials to test its brain implant. This device, known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), collects electrical activity from neurons and interprets those signals as commands to control external devices. This technology allows people with paralysis to control a cursor or keyboard with their thoughts. Precision Neuroscience implanted its brain implants in three people last year for about 15 minutes to see if the implant could successfully read, record and map electrical activity on the surface of the brain. They plan to expand the study to more patients in 2024.

These industry leaders, who are talking about the maturity of science and technology to have a real and dramatic impact on the human condition, are gradually realizing the huge capital investment needed for commercialization. However, this change is not simply a matter of technological achievement.It is another beginning that raises fundamental questions about our relationship with our bodies, and ultimately, the complex social, customary understandings and meanings we have about life and death.It is necessary to remember that.

A birth certificate records the moment we are born, just as a death certificate records the moment we die. This distinction reflects the traditional notion of a binary view of life and death. The biological definition of death has generally meant the "irreversible cessation" of life-sustaining processes maintained by the heart and brain. However, around 1960, the invention of cardiopulmonary resuscitation led to the emergence of the term "cardiac arrest", creating a distinction between unconditional death and other criteria. Furthermore, ventilators have turned people with brain damage into "walking corpses", sparking medical, ethical and legal debates about whether patients can be declared dead. Neuroscience has recently presented cases that contradict the traditional notion that the brain begins to be damaged after a few minutes without oxygen. This suggests that the boundary between death and life is becoming increasingly blurred.

In Madagascar, an island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, there is a ceremony called Famadihana where the remains of ancestors are exhumed from family tombs and danced with the bones of the deceased to the accompaniment of various brass bands. This ceremony shows a rather dramatic way of seeing death not as a final farewell, but as a continuous relationship, a process of life. For them, the excavation process is experienced as a time for family members to confirm their love for each other. They say that they have made their ancestors very happy through this ceremony. From them we see another provocation about consciousness, activity, artifacts and relationships that go beyond biological death.

We live in an age where there is an abundance of services that speak of humanity. We can see every moment that smart things, such as products, webs, and wearables, make our lives more convenient and respond directly to our needs. However, we need to pay attention to the fact that the breathless gaze, which is only focused on each living moment and presented competitively, makes us forget that we are beings on a limited path of death, and makes us taboo and distant. In 2014, cultural anthropologist Inga Träteler conducted a survey of 150 participants in Berlin using an interactive card game to explore their desires and needs regarding death. Through this process, they found that conversations about death, which would previously have led to isolation, confusion, and pain, could actually be quite open and interesting. They also found that the assumption that it would be an uncomfortable topic is in line with existing cold and strict funeral practices. In addition, they found that the experience of little deaths, such as turning off the lights alone and going to sleep when they were young, initially increased fear, but over time it became a process of gaining courage and strength.

The advancement of technology and science is causing our understanding of death to continue to evolve. The discovery that brain activity continues for a while after the heart stops provides the possibility of reversing the body's activity and suggests a richness of new awareness of life itself as well as concrete changes in end-of-life care in the time before and after death, which we can prepare for and experience in conversation as a family.

It's 2024. Perhaps this is the right time to focus on various perspectives on death as a criterion for how we remember, experience, and anticipate the past, present, and future.

References

The Race to Put Brain Implants in People Is Heating Up

The Biggest Questions: What is death?

In Madagascar, the Living Dance With the Dead

We need to talk about death

Putting Death in Its Place: Using Ethnography to Redesign Death⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠