![Medical teams at six research centers asked questions of 241 unresponsive patients with catastrophic brain injuries. A full 25% showed evidence of consciousness. If we do the math on this, one of the authors suggested that 100,000 people may well fall into this category in the United States alone. Medical teams at six research centers asked questions of 241 unresponsive patients with catastrophic brain injuries. A full 25% showed evidence of consciousness. If we do the math on this, one of the authors suggested that 100,000 people may well fall into this category in the United States alone.](https://publisher-ncreg.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/pb-ncregister/swp/hv9hms/media/20240904110924_d080c800cc0dc10b32955c997e3ad7a023f786426dc7e2b6547e3d5f48717b61.jpg)
The Mystery of Consciousness: New Study Challenges ‘Brain-Death’ Narrative
COMMENTARY: Contemporary Western cultures insist consciousness resides exclusively in our brains, but an abundance of recent scientific research indicates otherwise.
COMMENTARY: Contemporary Western cultures insist consciousness resides exclusively in our brains, but an abundance of recent scientific research indicates otherwise.
COMMENTARY: The April 11 statement by The National Catholic Bioethics Center affirms that ‘a partial brain death standard can never be acceptable to Catholics.’
COMMENTARY: The debate over brain death has no easy answer but requires astute attentiveness to science, Church teaching and the sanctity of human life.
COMMENTARY: It is vitally important for scholars to continue deliberating the validity of the neurological criterion to inform the Catholic magisterium’s discernment of whether what they learn of brain death continues to cohere with the Church’s traditional understanding of the nature of the human person.
COMMENTARY: Medical knowledge advances and our laws must change accordingly.
COMMENTARY: People of good will in and out of the medical community should support medical research seeking innovative, morally uncontentious ways to replace failing organs.
Catholic doctors and ethicists today largely echo St. John Paul II in stating that brain death, when properly diagnosed, is not a “kind” of death; it is simply death, period.
An estimated 42 people are declared brain dead throughout the U.S. every day.
The teen defied the medical definition of brain death, and her family’s fight to spare her life has fueled other challenges to this complicated medical diagnosis.
DIFFICULT MORAL QUESTIONS: The case of Trenton McKinley has renewed discussion and doubts about whether brain death constitutes actual death.
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