Resurrections failing, possibly working and apparently working rather well, have been a topic we have looked at time and again and a couple more have cropped up.

The first is the most horrific scenario that underlies this kind of brush with death - walking up when your autopsy is just starting!!

Manas Deo was critically injured after a vehicle hit him Dec 25 near Baragadia village in Jajpur, Oriya daily Sambad quoted Manas's wife Tiki Deo as saying.

Police brought him to a local hospital where the doctor on duty declared him dead.

"It was a surprise for the hospital staff and family members after Manas woke up when the doctors began his autopsy," the report said.

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Of course, being killed, autopsied and buried makes it much harder to come back from the dead, but that doesn't mean you can't pull off such a return (apparently):

A youth who was believed to have been stabbed to death and buried in 2005 has resurfaced in yet another mysterious return of a man from the dead in the Transkei.

Siviwe Ntwalana, of Mthatha’s New Payne Location, turned up at one of the village’s homes, where he was given food last Thursday.

“They noticed his resemblance to our family,” said his father, Mbongolwana Ntwalana, yesterday.

His elder brother’s daughter went to check and recognised him, he said.

Ntwalana said Siviwe, born in 1983, was later taken to his home, but his mother could not believe her eyes.

“She was shocked because she knew that her son had been buried,” he said.

The village’s committee was approached and then police took him to the local hospital.

“At that time I was not at home, but when I woke up the following day family members came to ask about him,” Ntwalana said, adding that he and his family subsequently went to the hospital to look for Siviwe.

Other family members were convinced it was his son when they saw him, but Ntwalana only believed it after checking certain marks on his body.

“What made me believe was a mark where he was gored by a cow near the eye,” he said.

“We were very excited to see him again because we knew he died.”

He explained that Siviwe was stabbed by another man during a love triangle argument and reported to have been killed.

Ntwalana said his son has yet to explain where he had been.

“He has not told us where he was all along. He breaks down when he speaks.”

As this is connected with a murder case this will be investigated further and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Superintendent Mzukisi Fatyela said police were investigating.

He said his fingerprints would be matched with those in his ID application and those of the person who was buried in 2005.

“That process will cast light on what exactly is taking place,” Fatyela said.

He added that the police would investigate what happened to the murder docket that had been opened.

As the article mentions, this is the second such incident in the Transkei in just over a year, the previous case being one we also reported on at the time. It is possible that the dead body was misidentified, however, it is also possible someone has stepped into a dead persons shoes after a high profile case (there was a weird report I caught late night on cable about an American boy returning to his family after a kidnapping many years earlier, only for the boy to turn out to be a Spanish orphan, or something similar - I've never been able to track down the exact story but it was on one of those single name talk shows, like Maury, Montel, etc.).

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Is fear really the mind-killer? Or can it actually fuel superhuman feats? I recently mentioned how people report having huge bursts of strength in adversity and now I find out that a book has just been released which looks the whole general area - the way fear can help people survive in extreme situations. It is Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff Wise and the Scientific American has an excerpt from it. It starts with a case very similar to the one we just looked at, where one Tom Boyle Jr. managed to lift a car high enough to get someone out from under it:

The local media celebrated Boyle's feat of compassion. The YMCA gave him an award. Newspapers and TV stations interviewed him. The fanfare flattered him and he felt extremely proud of himself. Yet to this day there's something about that evening that he can't figure out. It's no mystery to him why he did what he did—"I would be such a horrible human being to watch someone suffer like that and not even try to help," he says—but he can't quite figure out how.
   
"There's no way I could lift that car right now," he says.

Boyle, it should be pointed out, is no pantywaist. He carries 280 pounds on a six-foot-four-inch frame. But think about this: The heaviest barbell that Boyle ever dead-lifted weighed 700 pounds. The world record is 1,008 pounds. A stock Camaro weighs 3,000 pounds. Even factoring leverage, something extraordinary was going on that night.

They go into the mechanism a bit:

That something was the body's fear response. When we find ourselves under intense pressure, fear unleashes reserves of energy that normally remain inaccessible. We become, in effect, superhuman.
   
Under acute stress, the body's sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for sustained, vigorous action. The adrenal gland dumps cortisol and adrenaline into the blood stream. Blood pressure surges and the heart races, delivering oxygen and energy to the muscles. It's the biological equivalent of opening the throttle of an engine.
   
Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State who has extensively studied the biomechanics of weightlifting, draws the distinction between the force that our muscles are able to theoretically apply, which he calls "absolute strength," and the maximum force that they can generate through the conscious exertion of will, which he calls "maximal strength." An ordinary person, he has found, can only summon about 65 percent of their absolute power in a training session, while a trained weightlifter can exceed 80 percent.
   
Under conditions of competition a trained athlete can improve as much as 12 percent above that figure. Zatsiorsky calls this higher level of performance "competitive maximum strength." This parameter is not a fixed number—the more intense the competition, the higher it can go, as the brain's fear centers progressively remove any restraint against performance.

However, that still brings us to about 92% of what we can do, which is no way near enough to lift a car. Wise suggests something else kicks in:

The mechanisms by which the brain is able to summon greater reserves of power have not been well explored, but it may be related to another of fear's superpowers: analgesia, or the inability to feel pain.

...

under intense pressure—whether it's a bodybuilding competition, a kid trapped under a car, or an attacking bear—you just won't feel that pain. The body pulls out all the stops and lets you turn up the dial up to "11". You don't feel the ache of your muscles. You don't feel the pain. You just do what needs to be done.

I still don't buy it. A kinesiologist is going to be able to work out the maximum we can force out of the muscles and bones (forces and levers) and factor in other things. I can't see how not feeling the pain is going to help and even if it did you'd surely feel like you'd been hit by a truck afterwards. Perhaps the clue is in Min's comment on the previous article - why is it always a car? You don't hear so many tales of people being able to lift a tree trunk of someone. As the comments over on the Scientific American site make clear the science in the article is shaky (and sensationalist), people don't lift the full weight of a car - it is more like jacking up on side (or even corner?) to change a tire rather than lifting the whole thing (worth also bearing in mind that the weight tends to be focused on the engine so you could stand a better chance at the back) - something that an engineering lab could easily measure. It isn't something I'd recommend anyone trying if they didn't have to but it does bring the weight needing lifting down to the point that it isn't outside the human potential and it'd be possible for a big guy, like the one in that report (interestingly, in the previous case the man was 5-foot-7 and 185-pounds), to at least have a hope of lifting enough of the car to make a difference. It would still be an incredible feat though, but until we can get a decent estimate of how much weight would need to be lifted we can't really say how incredible it is.

The book goes on to look at a winder range of examples of the body being able to kick in to help us out of extreme situations. While it might not cast too much light on the question of people being seemingly being able to lift cars to help those trapped under them it does cast some interesting light on some of our core survival mechanisms. In some ways I am reminded of the Third Man Factor, although again it seems like it is a tricky process to control or use for some useful purposes outside of random crises.

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Book

Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff Wise
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

Cellular memory is a difficult beast to pin down, it is supported by hundreds of compelling anecdotal accounts but science has yet to pin down any kind of mechanism that could account for it. This, of course, might be a case of science lagging behind the evidence but it also has a mythic feel to it (where organs are instilled with their own vitality and influence on the body. In fact I mixed myth and cellular memory in my story "Prometheus Unbound"). However, until the science and the evidence come into synch, we only have the reports from people who believe their organ transplants have been life changing in more ways than one, like this:

It seemed too real to be mere coincidence - and it brought joy to Kaden Delaney's family.

Kaden's parents Greg and Shelley spent two years finding David Waters, whose life was saved when he received their son's heart after he died in a car crash.  But in an exchange of emails they learned Mr Waters amazingly had developed a taste for Burger Rings - which was Kaden's favourite snack treat.

Some background (see also the documentary below the fold):

The theory the brain is not the only organ to store memories or personality traits and memory as a process can form in other parts of the body such as the heart has been coined "cellular memory".

The most famous reported case was American Claire Sylvia, a heart-lung transplant recipient, who documented her sudden craving for beer, chicken nuggets and green peppers in a best-selling memoir after discovering her donor was an 18-year-old male who died in a motorcycle accident.

Westmead Millennium Institute professor and president of the International Transplantation Society Jeremy Chapman said the phenomenon had not been proven.

"There is no scientific basis of such a claim," he said. "There's so much fiction around transplants."

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