(Technically, the terminology in the title is wrong, but…)
Halloween season is upon us, and that’s got me to thinking about matters of great importance to our times…namely, brain transplants vs. head transplants.
Now, assuming you have the ability to perform such an operation (Dr. Robert White seemed to have some success in the area. Good man.), AND the ability to reconnect all of the severed nerve tissues*, is there any medical advantage in transplanting a brain into a new body rather than just an entire head?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that brain tissue wouldn’t be attacked by a donor body’s immune system, though I don’t know if that applies to other tissues (like blood vessels, or the dura) that you’d transplant at the same time. And I’d sure be surprised if that’d balance out trying to reconnect every single nerve and blood vessel (that’s, what…twelve cranial nerves? And I have no idea what you’d have to do to splice in the circulatory system.) to a brain you’re squeezing into a new skull. While keeping it alive.
The only "plus"es I can see from a layman’s point of view seem to be cosmetic, aside from the tissue rejection issue, if I’m even remembering that bit right. And I think that’s something that can be controlled with medication anyway. So, could any bigger brains than mine out there enlighten me, and put the question to rest?
*Or else the question becomes “quadriplegia vs. quadriplegia while blind, deaf, unable to feel, or talk.” Which is just silly.
Perhaps not, but note that the hard part - what is way, way beyond current surgical capabilities, and likely to remain so for a very long time (if not forever) - is getting all the nerves correctly coupled up to one another. (Note that White did not do this or even attempt to. His monkeys remained paralyzed, and presumably numb, below the neck.) There are many thousands, perhaps millions, of nerve fibres, each one of which would have to coupled up correctly to its counterpart in the body (and not every one necessarily even has an exact counterpart to connect to in a different body). These days, we don’t really know even how to reconnect one nerve fibre.
At least if you transplanted a whole head, you would not have to re-connect those cranial nerves that connect only to facial muscles and sensory organs in the head. But that still leaves you to deal with all the vast number of fibres in the spinal cord and in the cranial nerves that run to the rest of the body.
Your question is a bit like asking whether it would be more practical to fly to Jupiter just by flapping our arms, or to Neptune.
You’d also have to reconnect all the incredibly complex structures in the neck: Carotid artery, Internal and external jugular veins, trachea, esophagus, and a boatload of muscles, tendons, nerves and so forth.
I vote for brain transplant as easier than head transplant.
And I believe so far I’m the only poster in the thread that has removed a human head from its body.
As at least one poster in this thread who has removed a brain from a head, and many times at that, I’d vote for a head transplant. That way, there would only be the larger arteries and veins for you to join up. On the other hand, with a brain transplant, the blood vessels that you’d need to hook up will be much smaller and hopelessly complex (as they continued to bifurcate and trifurcate along the way from being extra-cranial to intracranial). So there!
What constitutes “success”? With loose enough criteria, I can do a head transplant with a saw and a stapler. I can do a brain transplant with a saw and an ice cream scoop.
Well, suppose you are transporting it onto a youthful clone body. Why would you want an old head, with old worn out eyes and so forth? Especially if you have life extension treatments that work better on brain tissue, or have to be applied on a tissue-for-tissue basis; you’d want to carry as little over as possible from the old body. Or the new head may be all-round superior to the natural version; enhanced senses and durability.
Another possibility is that what you are doing is transplanting the brain into an artificial casing, and that is what you put in the new body. The idea being that unlike a natural body part the casing is designed to be easily unplugged then plugged into a new body (which will be pre-made with the appropriate fittings naturally), so your future brain transplants will be extremely easy.
