Corporeal reanimation

Encyclopedia : C : CO : COR : Corporeal reanimation

Corporeal reanimation is the theoretical concept of reanimating a dead organism, restoring its living functions and enabling it to move and to freely interact with the world of the living as it did when it was alive.

Reanimation also refers to alleged supernatural phenomena in which the souls of deceased persons reinhabit their dead bodies and return to this world, usually to complete unfinished business.

In fiction

Many people, mainly fiction writers, have proposed how it would work, but their theories are only portrayed in movies or fantastic tales of "Zombies" or living-dead, and such. Despite this, it seems possible, mainly due to the precept that the neural functions and nodes inside most dead organisms remain functional even when the organism is dead. These can be controlled and stimulated with electric impulses, stemming from the brain or another source. The central idea focuses on the dead organism's brain being crudely revived to re-enable simple functions and allow passive ability of normal bodily operation, such as eyesight, hearing and acting on instinct, though how the brain is 'revived' is never explained. It is roughly reflected with movie plots, such as the introduction of a virus into a body, which slowly kills the host and reanimates it. This can be seen most notably in the game and film genre series Resident Evil.

In culture

An example of reanimation appears in the Caribbean tradition of voodoo: the zombie. True to modern portrayals, zombies have no mind or will of their own and are basically living-dead — although their bodies are metabolically active.

In science

The scientist and inventor James Lovelock pioneered reanimation research in the mid-1950s. In an interview with the BBC's Mark Lawson (BBC Four, May 22, 2006), he referred to an early experiment in which a common hamster was trained to find its way through a maze, then "frozen", and later brought back to life. "It was as good as new!" Lovelock said, "it could make its way through [the] maze, as it was trained to do before..." Details of similar experiments on rats.

Notes and references