Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? | Sue Blackmore

Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? | Sue Blackmore

Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? | Sue Blackmore 150 150 icnagency

By: Sue Blackmore | Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? | Sue Blackmore | Neuroscience | The Guardian

We are far more than just stored memories. To come back as an artificial being bereft of family and friends seems meaningless

Are you longing for your brain and all its memories to be preserved for ever? That once fanciful idea seems creepily closer now that a complete pig’s brain has been successfully treated, frozen, rewarmed and found to have its neural connections still intact. This achievement, by the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine (21CM), has just won the final phase of the Brain Preservation Foundation’s prize – a prize that demanded all of a brain’s synaptic connections be preserved in a way that allowed for centuries-long storage of the entire information content of a whole large mammal’s brain.

Related: Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it

My friends, family and old connections would be gone. No one would understand me and I would not understand them

Related: Do our memories make us who we are? – books podcast

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