How long can you breathe in a coffin

Swimmers or marathon runners with excellent lung capacity might gain an extra minute by holding their breaths. And the average volume of a human body is 66 liters. That leaves liters of air, one-fifth of which liters is oxygen.

If a trapped person consumes 0. Leff, professor emeritus at University of Chicago in the pulmonary and critical care department. He lived, by the way, for 24 more years. Matthew Wall was lucky that his body never reached the grave before he was discovered to be alive, but Angelo Hays was not.

He was buried quickly, and his own parents were not allowed to see his disfigured body. Two days after Angelo was buried, he was exhumed for an investigation.

The theory is that Angelo had been in a very deep coma which slowed his breathing way, way down. It was that slow breathing that allowed him to stay alive while buried. A person can live on the air in a coffin for a little over five hours, tops. But while the tests may show that you are technically alive, your new status may be small comfort to you and your kin.

I must decide whether to pull the plug. Not true! Not only have you lost all the upper brain functions that create your memories and behaviors and allow you to think and talk, but you have also lost all the involuntary stuff your lower brain does to keep you alive, like controlling your heart, respiration, nervous system, temperature and reflexes. If you are brain-dead, these functions are being performed by hospital equipment like ventilators and catheters.

You cannot recover from brain death. If you are in a coma, on the other hand, you are legally very much alive. In a coma, you still have brain function, which doctors can measure by observing electrical activity and your reactions to external stimuli. In other words, your body continues to breathe, your heart beats, etc. Even better, you can, potentially, recover from a coma and regain consciousness.

What better time to answer them than Halloween? Beatrix Kiddo emerged with just a few bloody knuckles after punching her way out of her own grave in Kill Bill 2. That degree of strength and perseverance, though useful six feet under, unfortunately exists solely in the realm of vengeful Tarantino heroines. Poe, the OG sicko, wrote The Premature Burial during the height of the 19th-century cholera epidemic, which birthed a general phobia of being buried alive.

While gravedigger error has been greatly reduced since then, our taphephobia has not, thanks in part to our morbid fascination with how premature burial actually kills us. In the spirit of Halloween, Inverse dug into three live burial scenarios.

In the classic buried alive scenario, asphyxiation is most likely to be the cause of death.