Recently received
another whatsapp forward. It talked about body parts transplantation and brain-death.
Thought of covering about it a bit.
Trying to be as
simple as possible. The picture bellow shows various functional areas of the
brain. That is, various parts/areas of the brain perform various different
functions, control different parts/limbs of our body.
(courtesy: http://bciovereeg.blogspot.in/2012/04/brain-anatomy.html)
Some parts- broca’s
area, wernicke’s area- are related to language processing, like understanding
meanings of words, producing meaningful words, fluency, being meaningful. Damage
to these areas will have negative implications on those skills of human beings.
Front-top portions
(just behind the temple of your forehead) perform jobs which are considered
higher mental functions. Means, these are the functions that can be performed
by only human beings! That is, other functions, like listening, voicing, sensitivity
to smell, sensitivity to even earth’s magnetic fields are all possessed by
other animals too.
But, thinking,
relating causes and effects (establishing causal-effect relationship from
observations) are all associated to this frontal lobe area of the brain.
Like these, various
parts of the brain perform various functions. So when, brain gets damaged,
depending on the area of damage, a particular function (which that damaged area
controls) gets impaired. When the damage is done to more number of areas,
losses are also proportionate. Strokes are of that kind too.
More painfully,
when that damage is irreversible/ non-recoverable, it leads to brain-death. That
is, those parts that control heart-beat, breathing may be completely intact. So
that the patient’s heart beat is good, blood circulation is also good,
breathing is normal.
But to call a human a human, he may have to perform
the most important task – ability to think independently. If one is unable to
think,…..it’s so sad. So, he should not lose that ability to think/analyze,
or that
part of the brain that gives him that ability. It’s in such cases,
doctors may advice euthanasia. Families may give consent for parts transplant.
(Not just that thinking independently, but also has to show other human
traits. This is a matter of concern for philosophy or sociology or fields like
that.)
There may be very
few doctors, who would not make all attempts to save a patient, in order to extract
parts. But may be, only a few. No ruling out the possibility. Others are indeed
good and cannot be held responsible for the crimes of other culprits. There is
no point in completely losing hope or accusing allllll altogether.
being an engineer, i may add something like this. in your PC, you got a BIOS, processor, cache memory, ram, hard disk, graphics card, sound processor, USB ports, optical disc drives, key board, mouse, monitor etc. different hardwares dedicated to different functions. and there are drivers that integrate(or bridge) those hardwares with the OS (operating system) through processor and/or motherboard. depending upon which hardware/driver gets damaged, your PC loses certain functionality, starts behaving erratically or gives you sub-par performance.
or it may happen, a boot sector virus attacks your PC hard disk or a physical blow damages your hard disk permanently and your system never wakes up. goes into a coma. what you do in the first case is, reformatting; and in the second case, buy a new HDD and install it.
but in human beings that luxury/option of reinstalling OS or installing a new HDD with boot-partition is not possible.
it may also happen, that your mother board no longer accepts your HDD. then either you can buy a new PC or go for a new assembled PC.
if you assemble a PC, then transfer alllllllllllll useful parts from old PC to new PC, to take advantage of those healthy parts. body-transplantation is done. only HDD and motherboard lost. allllll other parts are intact and serving.
for further info:
http://tamingthepolarbears.blogspot.in/2015/01/chapter-one-neuroanatomy-101.html
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