Brain Freeze
asteriskmag.com
Brain Freeze
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Brain Freeze
#2The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation, every 10 °C decrease in temperature halves chemical reaction rates. A coolant like liquid nitrogen halves the ordinary rate of chemical reactions 22 times over. That stretches a single second of life into 48 days.
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As you might expect, this simple idea turns out to be monstrously complicated and exacting in practice. The human body is much more finicky than the field’s founders in the 1960s had hoped. But the techniques exist. I’ve spent my life helping to develop them. The cryopreservation available today is far removed from the ideal — fussier, less elegant, and limited in what it can offer. There is much room for improvement and much work to be done. Still, it works, at least for a particular definition of working. We can’t yet warm up a frozen person and revive them, and it’s not certain we ever will. What we can do is reliably preserve memory in an information-theoretic sense. If our current understanding of neuroscience is correct, then we have the techniques to preserve all the information that makes a person who they are — albeit in a form that's impossible to extract with today's technology...
Re: Brain Freeze
#3The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation,…
> I’ve spent my life helping to develop them
Can you share more?
Re: Brain Freeze
#4The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation,…
> If our current understanding of neuroscience is correct
I can promise you, it isn't. We're still finding new organs ffs.
Re: Brain Freeze
#5The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation,…
> I’ve spent my life helping to develop them Can you share more?
That's what's outlined in the article!
(Btw, I (OP) am not the writer of this piece, I'm just quoting it. But I am also a neuroscientist who's interested in brain preservation, for what it's worth.)
Re: Brain Freeze
#6The idea of cryopreservation is simple and beautiful: When a person is beyond saving by modern methods, we can give them another lifeline. First, perfuse their bloodstream with antifreeze. Once administered, it’s possible to safely cool the body to incredibly low temperatures without ice forming inside organs and crushing delicate cells. Cold slows chemical reactions, all of them: According to the Arrhenius equation,…
> If our current understanding of neuroscience is correct I can promise you, it isn't. We're still finding new organs ffs.
This is akin to saying that because we don't know how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, that we know nothing about physics. One can admit there's still a lot left to learn about a field while acknowledging the fundamentals might be reasonably well understood.
Re: Brain Freeze
#7It's terrifying to think that due to the economics of this - ie controlled death, technical work done by specialists, decades of energy-stable cryopreservation -, it's mostly our present-day oligarchs who will be preserved and eventually immortalized.
Re: Brain Freeze
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If our current understanding of neuroscience is correct I can promise you, it isn't. We're still finding new organs ffs.
This is akin to saying that because we don't know how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, that we know nothing about physics. One can admit there's still a lot left to learn about a field while acknowledging the fundamentals might be reasonably well understood.
Are you claiming we understand the fundamentals of consciousness? ... I don't think that's remotely credible; and even the article doesn't make such a strong claim.
Re: Brain Freeze
#9It's terrifying to think that due to the economics of this - ie controlled death, technical work done by specialists, decades of energy-stable cryopreservation -, it's mostly our present-day oligarchs who will be preserved and eventually immortalized.
I don't think that's true at all. We routinely provide people with surgery by highly trained specialists and ongoing indefinite care while they're still biologically active. Outside of the US, this can even be done reasonably affordable. As far as medical procedures go, the one described here is fairly simple, and cold storage is also not that expensive. This should be accessible to anyone in a developed country.