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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I was saddened to hear that Kim Peek died on December 19th. Although he is probably best known to the public as the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man but he wasn't autistic and seemed to elude categorisation. Although his developmental problems meant he couldn't button his shirt, they also meant he was a savant with truly amazing memory abilities (not to mention information processing skills) but again he was more than that.

I have seen a lot of documentaries on him and, while I was initially uncomfortable with his public appearances (which had the, initially, uncomfortable feeling of the "freak" being shown off), he did seem to genuinely thrive on them and seemed to enjoy the practical application of his abilities (even if it is telling the ten thousandth person what day they were born on - I suspect his patience was even better than his memory). Not just that but he also developed in various ways following him being propelled into the public eye as "the real Rain Man" - he developed analytical skills, so he was no longer just a simple repository of information, and, perhaps more importantly, his sense of humour was allowed to flower. All this from someone who was nearly institutionalised from an early age, as so many before him have been. In the end he became a great ambassador for tolerance and acceptance, which is how I'll remember him.

Anyway Ed Pilkington has written an obituary for the Guardian that has more details and touches on the key points:

News of his death led to an outpouring of expressions of gratitude from thousands of parents of disabled children who said that the film, and Peek's many public appearances that followed it, had given them comfort and hope. "Kim taught us something about human potential beyond what most of us can even imagine let alone explain," said one commentator on his local paper, Deseret News.

"His legacy can be summed up in one word: inspiration," said Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin medical school who advised the makers of Rain Man and who was close to Peek for the past 20 years.

...

At the age of two his severe disabilities almost landed him for life in an asylum.

In those days his condition was known as "idiot savant" and considered best treated in mental institutions. He was seen by a neurologist who famously could spare only five minutes as he was on his way to a golf course, and who concluded that the infant Kim would never be able to speak or learn and should be taken out of society.

Fran Peek, however, refused to accept that advice — after all by the age of two Kim could already read and memorise books. For the following 56 years, Fran acted as his son's primary carer, guide and loyal friend. "My dad and I share the same shadow," Kim once said.

Together, father and son toured the world, taking their story of the potential to overcome even seemingly intractable disabilities to more than 2 million people.

"You don't have to be handicapped to be different. Everybody is different," Kim would tell his audiences.

...

Neurologist Elliott Sherr was part of a team at the University of California that was working with Peek at the time of his death, trying to understand the impact of the damage to his cerebellum. "His gift to the world was that he was a source of hope to others wherever he went," Sherr said.

...

Scientists remained intrigued by signs that over the years he seemed to acquire greater cognitive skills to interpret facts – something assumed to be lacking in savants.

He had begun to play the piano, and had developed something of a sense of humour. Before Rain Man he had shunned company and was incapable of looking people in the eye, but the film seemed to boost his confidence and social skills.

"He moved from holding this gigantic database of fact in his head to being able to join facts together," Treffert said. "He became a living Google."

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Babies born with anencephaly (having no brain) tend not to make it to full term and. even if they are born. they may only survive a few days.

His name is Nicholas, and he is a miracle child. This little boy living in Pueblo, Colorado, was born with anencephaly, a genetic disease in which a person has no brain, just a brain stem. This means baby Nicholas cannot see, hear, suck, crawl, or sit up. But he has survived without doctors or tubes to celebrate his first birthday.

...

Some babies, like Nicholas, are born with a rudimentary brain stem. The brain stem is responsible for basic vital life functions, such as breathing, heart beat, and blood pressure. The cause of anencephaly is unknown, although the mother’s diet, including an insufficient intake of folic acid, may play a role. Most scientists, however, believe many other factors are also involved.

Most babies born without a brain die within hours of birth, but Nicholas has beat the odds. According to his mother, Sheena Coke, “He’s a miracle. He’s changed so many lives.” She and her husband have a Christmas miracle in little Nicholas. He may not have a brain, but he has touched many hearts. Happy birthday, Nicholas, and Merry Christmas.

The only other well-known longer term survival of such a child is Baby K who made it to two and a half years. The case hit the news because of legal arguments over her medical care because she had recurring breathing problems. Hopefully, Nicholas and his family will be able to avoid such legal wrangles but we'll keep an eye out for any further developments.

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