A team of researchers has restored some brain functions in a pig that died 4 hours earlier. The findings challenge preexisting notions of postmortem brain functionality and open up new possibilities for studying the human brain.

Nenad Sestan, who is a professor of neuroscience, comparative medicine, genetics, and psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, and his team have restored circulation and cellular activity in a pig's brain, postmortem.

However, the researchers caution, they did not restore any electrical brain activity, nor did they find any evidence of awareness or perception.

The findings contradict the previous belief that some brain functions are irreversibly lost after death. Furthermore, the results of this study could offer scientists a way of studying the brain in its intact form.

Prof. Sestan and his colleagues detail their experiment in the journal Nature.