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.
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I think you answered your own question. The human nervous system to way too complex to unwire and rewire and the body can’t survive without the brain while that’s happening.
Same brain, new body? Maybe one day.
Same body, new brain? Probably never. Even if you swap the brain, how do you transfer the mind?Hot take: swapping brains is a body transplant, not a brain transplant.
Brain transplant is one of the rare occasions where you’d rather be the donor than the recipient.
Nice of everyone to give answers to this bot account. It has 4 alts that will post similar questions soon.
Can you list those accounts?
You have a category error that makes this hard to follow. Brains and minds are different things. The brain is a physical organ made of cells. A mind is the conceptual something that occurs when a brain is functioning.
Cut and then resolder a million wires?
Or maybe 10 million? We don’t even know the number…
It’s the difference between trying to stitch together a pipe and trying to stitch together perfectly one by one all the threads of a cord.
We cannot even reattach those cords within the same person when part of them break (spinal damage) much less do a transplant.
There’s not a hard-coded wiring diagram of how the neurons from the brain connect to the rest of the body—everybody’s wired a bit differently, and the brain normally figures out how to work with what it’s got during development. So there’s no one-to-one way to connect the nerves from one person’s brain to those in another person’s body—and if it doesn’t get the signals it’s expecting, it will just seem like noise.
Besides which—if I remember correctly, you can’t generally reconnect severed nerves. Instead, the remaining portion of the nerve cell has to grow a new axon that retraces the route of the old one, and it can only trace the old path for a limited distance (like, if it’s close enough to receive chemical signals from the original site). But I’m not sure I’ve got all the details right on that.
other organs is like plumbing. you mostly just have to connect up the blood pipes. nerves are way more complex. memory can’t be transfered at all. If it could be done its not really a brain transplant its a body transplant because the brain is the individual. thing is there are all kinds of things about your body that effects you so changing the body would change you a lot. hormones and such. it would be wild but its hard to say if we will ever be able to do something like 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.
Nerves can’t be always be reconnected due to scar tissue.
However, I recently saw something about some new tech that is meant to change this using stem cells and a scaffold to bridge the gap and get a signal flowing again so it may be possible in the not too distant future.
Your mind is your body + brain. Your behavior and all of your memories are due to how your synapses and intermediary cells were developed. Similarly, it also depends on the body chemistry.
If you were to fully transplant a brain to a new body and correctly link all the nerves, in theory you could have the same brain in a different body. In practice, this can fail miserably due to differences in all of your sensory connections to the brain and hormone levels.
It’s been a while since I looked into neuroscience, so there might be some things I am missing. The conclusion is that altering the chemistry around your body could change you as a person, even if your hypothalamus is the same (i.e., same memories).
Also see: Alan Moore’s early runs of Swamp Thing when he realizes that who he thought he was is just a memory.
