Ayo, does anyone know why a person cannot transfer memories by simply transfering brains?
Everybody knows that. If you transfer brains, your memories transfer with it.
If you transfer brains, you’re transferring the entire person. You can’t get one person’s memories into another person’s brain that way. You might as well ask why you can’t transfer the contents of one box to another box simply by swapping the positions of the boxes.
wait wait…you can transfer brains?
Well, no one said that the brains would function after the transfer.
Actually, I just assumed the question to be hypothetical.
Seeing as how the brain is what really counts, “brain transfer” or “brain transplant” should really be called “whole body transplant” or “everything transplant,” shouldn’t it?
… not that it’s possible yet. Even if you took the whole central nervous system, how many nerves run into the spinal cord and would need to be reattached?
In related news, Joel Achenbach in Why Things Are claims that we can keep a severed head alive by “percolating fresh blood through it.” I wonder who volunteered for that experiment?
monkeys
I long ago saw a documentary where monkeys where involved.
They could transplant the head and keep it alive, but with no control over the body.
Gruesom as this is, the doctor who perofrmed these experiments suggested it was a valid way to save the life of terminal patients. When they asked him if it wasn’t a bit horrible, I remember he said something like: “It depends on how much you want to live”
Keeping a severed head alive in such a way would just be a very extreme form of prosthesis; as long as the blood can be imbued with the correct levels of oxygen, nutrients, antibodies etc. it ought to work. A live severed head might well suffer serious psychological issues though, for reasons such as lack of sensory input and the general shock of it all…
To the OP though; you can’t just spoon out someone’s brain and plop it into somebody else’s skull and expect it to keep working.