Watch: This Is What Happens When You Die
Death is all around us. Every minute, an average of 100 people die somewhere in the world, and we humans aren’t excellent at accepting that, or the inevitable demise of ourselves. But understanding where our bodies end up when they die is an important part of comprehending how they operate in life, thus AsapSCIENCE is here to guide us through a science-based account of death.
Within seconds after death, your body’s oxygen supply is decreased, and brain activity increases. This may seem counter-intuitive given that dead people do not have ideas, but think of this activity as the final dying bursts of activity from neurons that are no longer supported by oxygen and hormone production.
Because the body’s supplies of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the body’s main source of energy, are depleted, any last-second twitches will cause your muscles, including the sphincter, to completely relax. This means that if your bowels were full when you died, they won’t be for long. (We warned you it would be morbid.)
Light-skinned people’s bodies don’t begin to take on that stale deathly hue until around 15 to 20 minutes after dead, when the absence of blood flow to the capillaries begins to drain the color out of them.
And if it sounds horrible, consider this: because your heart has stopped pumping, there is nothing pushing your blood around your body, thus depending on how your body is positioned when you die, the blood will end up pooling at the bottom.
As shown in the video above, the longer this ‘blood pooling’ is allowed to sit, the more your skin will develop a reddish-purple discoloration, which will peak at roughly the 12-hour mark.
It’s not pleasant to consider, but the way our blood pools and discolors our skin can tell coroners a lot about when we died and how we were positioned at the time of death.
Your body will go through the famed rigor mortis phase 3 to 6 hours after death. This happens because as your cell organelles deteriorate, they transfer calcium into muscle cells, where it binds to proteins essential for muscular contraction. This implies that your body will stiffen completely, and you could be locked in a very odd position for up to 24 to 48 hours after death.
Hopefully, someone has found you by this stage, for degradation is well and truly on its way. I’ll let the guys from AsapSCIENCE describe all the gruesome details of that process in the video above, but let’s just say you’re going to get up close and personal with putrefaction, and it’s not as pleasant as it sounds. Enjoy…
