To help better comprehend neurodegeneration and discover laws that determine causes and effects in neurodegenerative settings, the concept of the cell death continuum was extended to a hypothetical cell death matrix to embrace the ‘fuzziness’ of cell death in the injured CNS (Figure 2). A matrix might be a useful modeling tool for pathology in general and specifically for predicting the contributions of the different forms of cell death, and the possible identification of previously unrecognized forms of cell death in human neurological disorders and in their animal/cell models. The cell death matrix draws on the framework of biological space-time. It integrates space (location in brain, location of primary insult) and time into a continuum; thus, cell death manifests in a brain regional 3-dimensional context with time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different context than the spatial dimension. By combining space and time into a single matrix we organize a large number of cell death phenotypes and potential mechanisms into a manageable frame of reference to reveal the potential early and delayed responses of the brain to stress/injury and therapeutic interventions.