Elon Musk's Neuralink, which has been working to implant brain chips in humans since last September, has announced that it is recruiting volunteers for human clinical trials to test the device. Known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), the device collects the electrical activity of neurons and interprets those signals as commands to control external devices. This technology allows people with paralysis to control cursors or keyboards with just their thoughts. Precision Neuroscience also implanted its brain implant in three people for about 15 minutes last year to see if the implant could successfully read, record, and map the electrical activity of the surface of the brain. The company plans to expand its research to more patients in 2024.

These industry leaders, who tell us that science and technology have reached a stage of maturity where they can have a real and dramatic impact on the human condition and circumstances, are gradually realizing an increase in the massive capital investment needed for commercialization. However, this change is not simply about technological achievement, butanother start to raise fundamental questions about our relationship with our bodies, and ultimately, our complex social and customary understandings and meanings of life and deathit is necessary to remember.

Just as a birth certificate records the moment of our birth, a death certificate records the moment of our death. This distinction reflects the traditional notion of viewing life and death as a dichotomy. The biological definition of death has generally meant the 'irreversible cessation' of life-sustaining processes maintained by the heart and brain. However, the invention of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) around 1960 led to the term 'cardiac arrest', which, unlike before, became a criterion distinct from the unconditional meaning of death. Furthermore, ventilators turned brain-damaged people into living corpses with beating hearts, sparking medical, ethical, and legal debates about whether or not patients could be pronounced dead. The field of neuroscience has recently presented cases that contradict the traditional notion that the brain begins to suffer damage after a few minutes without oxygen, further blurring the lines between death and life.

In Madagascar, an island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, there is a ritual called Famadihana where the remains of ancestors are exhumed from family tombs and danced with the bones of the dead to the accompaniment of various brass bands. This ritual shows a somewhat dramatic way of viewing death not as a final parting, but as a continuing relationship, a process of life. For them, the exhumation process is experienced as a time for family members to reaffirm their love for each other, and we see another provocation of consciousness, activity, artifacts, and relationships beyond biological death in them who say they have made their ancestors very happy through this ritual.

We live in an age where services that talk about humans abound. We can see every moment that smart things like products, the web, and wearables make our lives more convenient and respond directly to our needs. But this suffocating perspective, which remains only in each living moment and is presented competitively, personalized, and only adjusted to the present, makes us constantly forget that we are beings on a limited path of death, and it also makes us taboo and alienated. In 2014, cultural anthropologist Inga Trætle conducted a survey of 150 participants in Berlin using an interactive card game to explore desires and needs related to death. This process revealed that conversations about death, which previously would have given rise to isolation, confusion, and pain, could actually be experienced quite openly and interestingly, and that the assumption that this was an uncomfortable topic was linked to cold and rigid traditional funeral practices. In addition, they found that childhood experiences of going to sleep alone in the dark, which initially increased fear, had a positive effect of gaining courage and strength over time.

Technological and scientific advances are making our understanding of death continue to evolve. The discovery that brain activity continues for some time after the heart stops presents the possibility of restoring bodily activity, suggesting new consciousness and dialogue that we as families will prepare for and experience in the time before and after death, and a new awareness of life itself.

It's 2024. Perhaps this is the most appropriate time to focus on different perspectives on death as a benchmark 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