What does the public need to know about brain death?

Abstract

Brain death differs from traditional circulatory death, and understanding how it differs is important. Public awareness of brain death is based largely on inaccurate media representations, common examples of which are described here. The purpose of this article is to motivate lay understanding of brain death by tracing key moments in the history of how we've come to define and recognize brain death as death. This article also considers criticisms of brain death and rebuttals to those criticisms.