I know that heart transplants are around but the same can’t be said for brains. Both are organs, however the brain is a delicate and complex one more the heart. Also there’s the issue of removing it literally kills the patient since the brain is connected to the spinal cord, optic nerve & etc.
Even if it was possible under the current technology we have, would there still be limitations? How will memory transfer work if giving an Alzheimer’s patient a new mind, implanting a new one replacing the diseased one. The brain is sensitive to drops in oxygen levels (it dies when low).
The brain is the command center for a person, without one: person is dead (literally), so there’s that dilemma. You need technology similar to a cardiopulmonary bypass but for the brain to retain essential functions and information, if you want to keep the patient alive during a mind transplant.
Let’s say you managed to implant a new mind: you now have the arduous task of reconnecting every single nerve (visible and microscopic) and restoring key functions (spinal cord integration), also taking into account if the patients immune system will accept or reject that.
the human brain has roughly 100 billion neurons.
These neurons have roughly 10-1000 trillion synaptic connections between them. Connections that are always shifting and changing.
the human brain isn’t a computer; you can’t just read them like you can a hard drive or memory stick… what we can do is read changes that represent certain kinds of thoughts like moving certain muscle groups or learning to move a mouse pointer; and that’s pretty much it. we have no way of ‘reading’ memories stored in those connections, not even on an individual basis; never mind at the scale and fault-tolerance that would be necessary to ensure that it was roughly the same person coming out the other end.
And then there’s the ethical implications.