Science assures us it has everything to do with the three-pound organ between our ears, with its billions of neurons and trillions of delicate connections. But it’s a lot trickier to explain why we have a sense of self-awareness or to pin down precisely where that first memory of Mommy actually resides. As we age, we forget most of what we’ve experienced, yet there’s still undeniable continuity: At 30, or 50, or 70, you will still be you.
To preserve that elusive continuity of self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going—even beyond death. Let’s call them the “mind savers.” They’re exploring everything from freezing brains in liquid nitrogen to augmenting living ones to uploading our memories to the cloud. Here, we look at six possible paths for keeping your mind going, how feasible they’d be, and what benefits the present-day research might bring—even if cognitive immortality doesn’t pan out.
In 1970, the neurosurgeon Robert White removed the head of a rhesus monkey and transplanted it onto the body of another. The patched-together primate lived several hours before succumbing to its injuries. White, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, tried the surgery several times.
Remarkably, the reattached heads could move their eyes and mouths, but because he’d severed the monkeys’ spinal cords, those heads never gained control of their new bodies. White’s experiments have been a source of grim fascination ever since. But to a few neuroscientists they’re inspiration, suggesting that one day a human head transplant—or, as some call it, a body transplant—could succeed.
The idea’s main proponent is Sergio Canavero, a controversial Italian surgeon who, 10 years ago, even claimed he’d found a volunteer in Valery Spiridinov, a computer programmer suffering from a degenerative muscle disease. Spiridinov initially agreed to have his head transferred to the body of a brain-dead donor in China, but he later bowed out of the plan and instead got married. And that might be just as well.
Critics say the procedure would be more like murder than medicine. Or, best-case scenario: Volunteers would be left paralyzed and in need of a ventilator for life. Canavero says that’s not necessarily true.
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