"So ended Kars, last and greatest of the Pillar Men... His body turned hard as rock and he floated through space for the rest of time, never to return. He wished for death, but there was nothing out there to kill him. The spark of thought within him went dim...and then, silent."
— The Narrator, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency
The brain is the orchestrator of the symphony known as the human body. All functions of your body are monitored, regulated, and controlled by your brain, whether you consciously think about it or not. If your brain's connection to your body is severed, so too will your soul be to this mortal coil. At least, that's the working theory.
What if your brain stopped working, but you aren't dead? Well, for one thing, that would certainly lead to a lot of Surreal Horror, after all the catatonic state of not being able to think is certainly harrowing. Common causes include: an extremely traumatic incident one can't recover from, an assault on your senses to the point where the brain shuts down, and having your personality be overwritten entirely.
Inverse of And I Must Scream. Super-Trope of Heroic BSoD and Villainous BSoD. See also Soulless Shell and Empty Shell.
As a Death Trope, spoilers are unmarked on this page. You Have Been Warned.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Done to death (or lack thereof) in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
- Battle Tendency: The ultimate fate of Kars after getting launched into the stratosphere on Isola di Volgana. He's launched into space at escape velocity and freezes before he can reverse his direction, floating off into space as an unkillable, completely stationary superbeing. Ultimately his only remaining escape is to simply stop thinking.
- Stone Ocean: Happens to Jotaro after Whitesnake takes away his memory and stand disks. He's kept alive by the Speedwagon foundation, but in a comatose state where his body is doing none of the unconscious work to live.
- Steel Ball Run: Magenta Magenta has a stand that makes him completely invincible while holding a certain pose. He gets trapped in that pose at the bottom of a river while covered in electric cables, so he just stays there. In reference to what happened to Kars in Part 2, he "stopped thinking."
Comic Books
- In IDW Publishing's Transformers comics (including The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, The Transformers Megaseries and The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers):
- It's eventually revealed that there's a principle known as Rossum's Trinity. This principle posits that a Transformer has 3 vital interlinked parts (the brain module, the transformation cog, and the Spark), and enough damage to any one component can cause the other two to shut down and result in death.
- A Zero point is a form of injury that can occur when a Transformer takes damage to the head or chest. The Spark travels through the body, turning the otherwise lifeless metal into the parts of a living Transformer; a Zero point is a microscopic fissure that opens and prevents the Spark from making its way through the body. This leaves the Transformer alive but comatose, slowly dying as the body shuts down due to loss of contact with the Spark. Ultra Magnus was said to have recovered from this kind of injury, while Springer likewise springs back after his comrade Roadbuster manages to trigger an emotional reaction.
Film — Live-Action
- Spider-Man: No Way Home: Doctor Octopus briefly "turns off" after Peter administers his cure. It gives everyone a scare that they're in the hands of someone who'll accidentally kill them until he jolts back into consciousness with a more optimistic attitude.
- Strange Days: When Lenny tries to contact Tick, his SQUID supplier, he finds that Tick has been rendered vegetative by an amplified SQUID device (he describes it as Tick's frontal lobe had been turned into two runny eggs). When Mace asks Max how long it lasts, he quietly says "Forever." Later, when Lenny goes to confront Philo Gant he finds the same thing was done to him.
Literature
- The Cosmere:
- Elantris: Due to the loss of their magic, Elantrians can neither die nor heal, so all their injuries hurt as if they were fresh. If they're hurt too badly, the pain drives them into permanent catatonia. Zig-zagged at the finale when The Magic Comes Back and heals them.
- The Stormlight Archive: Spren can't be killed but can be driven into permanent catatonia by overwhelming injury or pain. Also, if they bond with a Knight Radiant who then breaks their vow, the spren is reduced to a mindless automaton called a Deadeye. In Rhythm of War, a Deadeye shows signs of recovery for the first time in history.
- In The Ship Avenged, Belazhir commissions a Synthetic Plague intended to leave one fifth of the population unaffected and destroy the minds of everyone else. He makes his old enemy Amos immune and a carrier for the plague just to torment him, and shoves another character into Amos's cell to prove the effects. Within a couple of days the other man has lost his memory of himself, any knowledge of toilet-training, and language. He's still mobile and retains enough faculties to fear Belazhir and to cling to Amos for comfort. It's never stated if his old self can be recovered, or if the new one can even start over.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): In the final season, a ricocheted bullet to the skull causes Anders to degrade to such a state, having only occasional flashes of lucidity.
- Misfits: A villain in Series 2 Episode 6 circumvents Nathan's Resurrective Immortality by telekinetically stuffing his brain with cheese, reducing him to a vegetable without activating his powers. He's only saved by using time travel to prevent it from happening.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The Chaos mutation "Mindless" transforms the afflicted person's brain to warpstone and removes their intelligence score. They're reduced to an automaton that can do nothing but follow simple commands from spellcasters.
Video Games
- Cyberpunk 2077: This is the fate of Evelyn Parker, who ropes you into the ill-fated Relic heist in Act 1. If you follow up on her afterwards, you discover that her brain implants had been hacked by the Voodoo Boys, after which she was sold off to a street gang for "use" in snuff porn. Even if you manage to rescue her, she is so traumatized, she retreats completely into her mind and remains unresponsive, before eventually committing suicide in a rare lucid moment.
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: This was Junko's ultimate plot in orchestrating the killing game. With the avatars of the remnants dead, their bodies in the real world are left without functioning brains. Junko planned to infect the dead students' brains with her consciousness, but Hajime uses his newfound hope power to summon Usami and destroy her. At the end of the game, the living students isolate themselves on the real Jabberwock Island to hopefully restore the brains of their friends.
- Dwarf Fortress: One of the four types of insanity a dwarf can hit when their stress is at a terminal point is Catatonia, which afflicts those who are neither irascible, anxious nor depressive and those who "become completely helpless in stressful situations." The effects are simple: The dwarf's mind seemingly shuts down completely, and they will just lie there staring off into space with no reaction to any stimuli until they starve to death, or something else kills them (which they will not even react to).
- Fire Emblem Engage: When Emblems become Dark Emblems when summoned by Fell Dragons, such as Sombron, they lose their ability to think and communicate.
- Heroes of Might and Magic IV: Gavin Magnus, the Big Bad of the Price of Peace campaign, tries to use an artifact called the Crystal Pendulum to remove free will from all living beings. He's stopped when Emilia destroys the crystal, destroying his mind in turn. He's still alive, but is left devoid of thought and unable to do anything aside from the most basic functions.
- Persona:
- Persona 3: People victimized by Shadows during the Dark Hour develop what's called Apathy Syndrome, which in more severe cases manifests as a loss of mental capacity albeit with biological functions intact.
- Persona 5: People whose Shadows are killed within the Metaverse suffer a mental shutdown. In most cases, this is lethal, but there is at least one case that merely left its victim in a coma, that being of Ichiko Ohya's former journalist partner.
- Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: Conversations with Team Plasma members after the final confrontation mention Ghetsis Harmonia got stuck in such a state after his Villainous Breakdown, driven to such depths of furious madness by his final defeat that he just burned out and stopped responding.
Web Animation
- Animator vs. Animation: Upon learning that the stick figures escaped from the parkour trap, King gets so angry that he makes an example out of an innocent Piglin by casting the {NoAI:1} command, eliminating its sapience.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The solution to Cindy and Jimmy switching minds is to literally drain their brains out of their bodies and have the rest of the gang insert their personalities back one trait at a time.
- Batman Beyond: Jackson Chappell, Bane's caretaker and Venom dealer, ends up in this state in "The Winning Edge" after a combination of Venom overdose and a chemical explosion. Batman finds him in the ruins relatively unharmed, but completely unresponsive to any stimuli, just staring straight ahead and drooling. He's never seen again after his episode, either.
- Justice League:
- "Wild Cards": The Joker claims Insanity Immunity when it comes to Ace's Mind Rape powers, but when she discovers he had been using her just like everyone else in her life had, she decides to test how far this goes and turns her powers up to the max. The result drives Joker into such a pit of madness he just collapses onto the floor, utterly catatonic and entirely gone. While chronologically this takes place before Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker and thus he presumably recovered, this is the last time he's ever seen in the series.
- "Starcrossed": Martian Manhunter accidentally shuts down a Thanagarian pilot called Kragger in this manner, after being forced to "try harder" to read his mind and figure out how to fly his ship. Kragger needed to be mounted into advanced, specialized machinery to make him anything more than a vegetable in "Hunter's Moon", and even then, he's very feebleminded.
- "Kid Stuff": After the League defeats Mordred, he loses his eternal youth, but not his immortality. This leaves him completely unresponsive, trapped in a body that has aged thousands of years in seconds.
Real Life
- One of the closest real-life analogues to this trope is Alzheimer's disease, which causes the brain to progressively atrophy until death. As it progresses, it causes increasingly severe problems with memory, thinking, reasoning, and other tasks. It culminates in "late-stage" Alzheimer's, where the person loses the ability to respond to their environment or even carry on conversations, and suffers drastic personality changes.
