Word: moment
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People commonly perceive death as being a moment - you're either dead or you're alive. And that's a social definition we have. But the clinical definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light into someone's pupil, it's to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem, and that's the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn't work, then that means that the brain itself...
...technology challenging the perception that death is a moment...
...even if we restart the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable, because the cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it's not a moment; it's a process that actually begins when the heart stops and culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What's going on to a person's mind? What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death...
...Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that, well, when you die, you die; that's it. Death is a moment - you know you're either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically valid, but they're social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of motion, and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was out there in the universe...
...fell 504 points. Pretty drastic. The next day it gained 142 points. The lesson: these are volatile days and weeks, and timing the market is a crapshoot, even for the pros. The ability of ordinary investors to move in and out of investments at the right moment tends to be pretty bad anyway. A longitudinal study by the research firm Dalbar shows that as mutual-fund investors increase the length of time they hold their funds, they do better relative to stock and bond indexes. "Our emotions are backward-looking, but the market is always about what's going...