So you die in 2050. Then, a few decades later, your ancestors pick up your brain at the local cranium depot, upload it to a computer and read your memories. Maybe they reanimate you with an artificial body. <\/p>\n
This scenario, brought to you by chemical brain preservation, is a hypothetical procedure where doctors preserve a dying persons brain complete with memories and knowledge for a possible revival later. <\/p>\n
This is just another way of having another morning, says John Smart, sounding a bit like fictional ad man Don Draper reciting a slogan. Its just a very unusual strange way, now my morning is 50 years later, I wake up again. <\/p>\n
Smart is a futurist and this weekend, futurists from around the world will converge at Torontos Sheraton Centre for their yearly conference about intriguing technologies and ideas. Smart, who is the co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, will talk about how to live forever. <\/p>\n
The idea is that if the synapses and connections of the brain are preserved at death, the contents of the brain your broken arm from soccer, that time you vomited on the bus downtown, the birth of your child may be understood later, when neuroscience is more advanced. <\/p>\n
Someone will eventually crack the long-term memory code, to show which chemicals need to be preserved, Smart said. <\/p>\n
But first, the preservation of the entire brain must be perfected like a very high end, rigorous embalming. Neuroscientists can already preserve small volumes of brain tissue after death, but The Brain Preservation Foundation is holding a contest with a $25,000 prize to the first team to perfectly preserve all the connections inside a mouses brain, and a $75,000 purse for the preservation of the large mammalian brain, using either cryogenics or plastination. <\/p>\n
You have to have a preservation technique that will very quickly go in after the animal dies, before any cell damage starts occurring, and lock down all those protein molecules, to keep them from being able to decay and interact with each other, he said. <\/p>\n
So far, two teams are competing, with judges from Harvard and MIT. Things seem reasonable so far. <\/p>\n
We might come across something that makes it unreasonable at any one of these steps, he said. The biggest weirdness is this whole process, the idea that people can be preserved. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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