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Brain Transplants
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12-11-2010 4:57pm#1I remember mentioning this once in school years and years ago. I must have been really young but I remember saying that I hoped one day, far in the future, people could have their brains transplanted so that when someone reaches the end of their life they can have another, perhaps in the body of a young person who died of brain death themselves.
Do people think this will ever happen?An arguably more reasonable scenario is a partial brain transplant involving only enough tissue to provide key memories and a sense of continuity of identity. A fairly large but indeterminate amount of the brain is devoted to processing and controlling sensory, motor, and autonomic functions such as vision, olfaction, movement, appetite, etc.; transplanting these portions is likely to be difficult and, if the goal is to transfer memories and/or identity, unnecessary. The recipient body of such a transplant probably would have to possess a naïve and never-conscious brain or partial brain, such as in a never-conscious cloned soma. This is the premise of I of Persistence, a human life-extension manifesto and science fiction story. In that story, the older transplanted brain tissue is eventually removed and replaced with youthful tissue, restoring complete youthfulness with continuity (or persistence) of conscious identity.
In 1982 Dr. Dorothy T. Krieger, chief of endocrinology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, achieved notable success with a partial brain transplant in mice.[1] A partial brain transplant would accomplish essentially the same goal — movement of a person's "identity" from one body to another — and thus qualify as a whole-body transplant no less than a full brain transplant. As Dr. Krieger demonstrated, barriers to accomplishing this feat might be much lower than transplantation of the entire brain.
In 1998, a team of surgeons from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center attempted to transplant a group of brain cells to Alma Cerasini, who had suffered a severe stroke that caused the loss of mobility in her right limbs as well as limited speech. The team's hope was that the cells would correct the listed damage.
After all, we only use 1/10 of our brain's capacity in our lifetime, and the knowledge of 10 lifetimes would be something incredible - imagine being able to live an average 800 years....
I should have sued Star Trek DS9 though, because they kind of stole "my" idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trill_(Star_Trek)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJhqwfyHf8Comments
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Motley Crue wrote: »I remember mentioning this once in school years and years ago. I must have been really young but I remember saying that I hoped one day, far in the future, people could have their brains transplanted so that when someone reaches the end of their life they can have another, perhaps in the body of a young person who died of brain death themselves.
Do people think this will ever happen?
After all, we only use 1/10 of our brain's capacity in our lifetime, and the knowledge of 10 lifetimes would be something incredible - imagine being able to live an average 800 years....
I should have sued Star Trek DS9 though, because they kind of stole "my" idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trill_(Star_Trek)
*Sigh*0 -
Motley Crue wrote: »I remember mentioning this once in school years and years ago. I must have been really young but I remember saying that I hoped one day, far in the future, people could have their brains transplanted so that when someone reaches the end of their life they can have another, perhaps in the body of a young person who died of brain death themselves.
Do people think this will ever happen?
After all, we only use 1/10 of our brain's capacity in our lifetime, and the knowledge of 10 lifetimes would be something incredible - imagine being able to live an average 800 years....
I should have sued Star Trek DS9 though, because they kind of stole "my" idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trill_(Star_Trek)
Er. Who says we only use 1/10th of capacity? I'm using practically everything I haven't killed with booze yet.0 -
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Motley Crue wrote: »I remember mentioning this once in school years and years ago. I must have been really young but I remember saying that I hoped one day, far in the future, people could have their brains transplanted so that when someone reaches the end of their life they can have another, perhaps in the body of a young person who died of brain death themselves.
Do people think this will ever happen?
After all, we only use 1/10 of our brain's capacity in our lifetime, and the knowledge of 10 lifetimes would be something incredible - imagine being able to live an average 800 years....
I should have sued Star Trek DS9 though, because they kind of stole "my" idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trill_(Star_Trek)
One of the worlds greatest urban myths.
If you think about it for a second, if you cut 90% of your brain out would you perform to the same level?0 -
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