Can a human head be kept alive as an active living being? obviously it has no appendiges... but could it be like dam... im just a head... or would it be all neurological reads only?

It would need a source of fresh blood and oxygen, not to mention food energy.

Indeed.

A head could theoretically live, but in practice there's some pretty darn huge issues.

Once medical science progresses, we might be able to keep a head alive, and even give that said head a robotic body, making the human whose head it is a completely functional human again.

say a head is decapitated...hypothetically... you plugged the magic cables into it before termination. is there automatic capability loss to its function from body seperation even though the magic cables were linked into it. could the jaw operate without the rest of the bones and muscles?

Magic cable?

I have no idea how it would work in practice, because we're talking about the most complex part of the human body: The head, with the brain and all. Assuming the head is able to be kept alive, then jaw muscles should work as well.

I'm not sure if you'd able to speak, since your voice doesn't just pop out of your mouth. Hacking a head off and keeping it alive means you lose a lot of important parts.

Of course, those parts could be replaced with robot-parts, if technology advances enough for that.

ah yes vocal chords.. face palm... now this is just a scary notion.

I don't need my head to be kept alive. I'm in a very sophisticated life support chamber. Why, my knowledge of the science of longevity could fill several textbooks.

Thats what the fluids in the glass jar are for. It keeps all of those functions functional and functioning.

More than vocal chords, you need lungs to push the air that operates the vocal chords.

If you use an iron lung type of device, that wouldn't be needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qobhDJ_vEOc

Is that you... Frank Sinatra?

I think so. If before death you re-routed the carotid and jugular veins to a cardiopulmonary bypass system, and then had the required nutrients, vitamins, and hormones (because the lymphatic system would be mostly gone) injected into the blood lines.

Not saying it's flawless, in fact they would only be sustained for a few hours before the complications of the CPB kicked in. But it's something

What would and wouldn't work would depend on factors such as shock, where the head was cut off from, etc.

Iron lung is basically a chamber that uses differing pressures to "force" you to breath. They still require lungs to work, just as modern respirators do.

I assume Colonel Martyr meant with "iron lung type of device", a fake lung that works just like a real lung for all intents and purposes.
Such a thing isn't yet possible, and would probably be of something more flexible than iron, but the idea of a fake lung creating sound isn't impossible.

I'm sure every part of the human body could be replaced by a fake replica, given time, money and technology.

Thank you! I'm not very knowledgeable to say precisely what I mean, I just have vague notions and hope others can fill in the blanks as to what precisely I mean.

I'm fascinated with modern prosthetics, Amputees will be the first cyborgs, obviously.

I can't think of a worse fate than to be alive with just your head.

They can in Futurama.

And get fed like goldfish.

I think that at one time some scientists had experimented with surgically removing a monkey's (can't remember what species) head and keeping it alive for a few hours.... However such experimentation is now illegal, thankfully. So if it could be done for one species, it probably could be done for humans as well, though I don't know why anyone would want to.

However, as I type this I remember the movie The Ice Pirates which had a character who was just a head, although at first he had a prosthetic body... then there's also the original Robocop who was pretty much just a human head on a military-style robot...

As others have said, it could be possible in theory. The main issue here, though, is that once you supply it with all of the systems necessary to ensure its survival, it would be difficult to classify as something that is just "living" on its own. You'd essentially have to give it an artificial body to keep it operating, and at that point it wouldn't be something that operates on its own.

I think OP has watched too much of this. That, or Robocop.

Pretty sure the head lives for 30 seconds or something after decapitation or something like that.

You would have to oxygenate the blood artificially so that the "iron lung" was only used for the voice. There are lots of parts of the brain that would be expecting to be connected up to the rest of the nervous system -- you might have to interface them with some kind of neural simulator to avoid a shock reaction of some sort. This would have to be very complex if it was going to simulate e.g. the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system.