It turns out, you don't need your head to live. It's hard to say when the myth started, but just two years after the first demonstration, the whole idea of 'brains' and 'memories' sounds as silly as when people thought tomatoes were poison.
The first pioneer to publicly remove his head was a scientist named Blake. Blake had some hits early in his career, like the Silent Potato Chip, and Perennial Tulips, but his later work was uninspired, and he was mostly viewed as washed up by the scientific taste makers.
So, when he announced his public beheading, everyone thought it was one last publicity grab -- a chance to steal the spotlight from the younger, more buzz-worthy inventors. Creative deaths were somewhat in fashion back then, with every ageing starlet scheming to get the top-ranked obituary, but he seemed to genuinely believe he would survive, and the science was at least outlined, if not fully fleshed.
As we understand now, it's simple: So much of our life, and our thoughts are externalized -- shaped by impressions of everyone around us -- that we can operate without any internal thought at all. We can be fully sustained by the crowd's collective perception of us.
On that stage, dressed in the retro Labcoats some had started to wear ironically, he was everybit the celebrity people remembered. And when his sexy lab assistant dramatically appeared with a samurai sword and lopped off his head, there was an instant of pure silence before the crowd broke into a lackluster applause.
At this point, many started to grumble and lurch towards the exits, but the ushers insisted they sit, heavy traffic be-damned, and focus on the (dead?) body being held up on what looked like a pair of sawhorses. As they focused, a flickering started in the general area of the stage, soft and dispersed, but slowly gaining density.
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