Aww… excuse me, have to go post again in the QtM Awe thread…
PS taking out brains is fun
You’re so right, so right. And the heart can take a few minutes of not beating if it’s soaked in potassium solution and kept very cold; but the brain as far as we know cannot go without oxygen.
Although I have read about people (mostly small children) who were immersed in very cold water for much longer periods than you would think survivable, like 30 minutes, who were brought back by CPR. Don’t know if they came back fully mentally (shaved a few IQ points off, eh kid?) but I do know that is the genesis of the myth that you can’t declare a person dead after drowning until the body warms back up to 98.6/37.
However, as long as we’re fantasizing some way to reconnect the entire custom wiring of the spinal cord, why not fantasize we’ve improved ECMO until we can have an artificial heart/lung system pump oxygenated cold blood into the carotids and vertebrals during the entire time we’re transferring the transplanted brain?
(Extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation)
You know, Cartooniverse, you’re funny, but you’re just a wee bit strange.
And from me, that’s…
(a characterization from a person who has worked professionally with a whole lot of functional, admittedly, but rather strange people)
Sure, I think you’re right. I’m thinking of the developing embryo at about neural crest scattering time. The developing nerves push themselves through developing tissue, creating little pathways for themselves, at the same time as millions of neurons related to those axons migrate through eachother to form the four layers of the cerebral cortex, with way more than half those neurons choosing to die at some point. Reduplicate that wiring system.
I should add that when you pull a spinal cord out of its nesting place in the core of the spine, you have to rip (generally) or cut (if their dura fights you) a pair of spinal nerves for every vertebral level. That’s going to be a whole lot of custom-wired stumps to hook up. And that requires seven pairs of neck spinal cord arteries even for the head transplant, which has been the closest idea so far to possibility.
–smacks forehead-- Of COURSE !! How foolish of me. The heart-lung is attached to the patient. The heart-heart is attached to the heart. The footbone is connected to the shinbone. Dayum.
gabriela, you damn me with faint praise. If it were any fainter, the Aracebo Very Large Array wouldn’t be able to detect it !! So, raise the level just a bit, eh?
You’ve obviously never seen any of my house remodel work! :eek:
One question that has come up and could be clarified some: What about just keeping the whole head alive? Blood in/blood out and cleaned & oxygenated with the proper machines, larynx operated through a ventilator. Why wouldn’t that work? How is that much different from what Christopher Reeves had to go through?
You’d have to add nutrients to and filter wastes out of the blood to keep the head alive for any length of time, but yeah, you could do it.
And here’s a download link for that footage of the Soviet dog-head experiments. It’s 64 megs, and might not be safe for work—(It might be OK for gabriela’s work.)—and it has footage of dogs (and dog organs) in various states of vivisection. (Including one Head on a Heart-Lung Machine™)
Oh, by the way, speaking of dog experiments, there were the Pittsburgh experiments in reviving dogs clinically dead for three hours. (Most without brain damage.)
They are hoping to test such a procedure on humans in the near future—I imagine that, if and when it’s a standard practice, chilling a human brain or head prior to transplant would buy the surgeons a lot more than eight minutes to get the blood supply restored.
Aside from, y’know, the major problem of getting all the nerves hooked up again in the right places. But hey, one miracle at a time.
Hey, I said you were funny.
I dunno, there’s just something about the conjunction of the three pictures, “makes a boy shiver,” “stalk”, and “pituitary,” that sets off my weirdness meter.
But it’s calibrated to register a lot higher than that.
I suspect you weren’t REALLy truing.
Is that better?
Wow, actual cites and videos. Impressive.
Can’t add anything to Ranchoth.
sorry Cartooniverse - still working on less faint praise for you
You would need to keep exchanging the blood, or adding supplements to make up for platelets/white cells/nutrients/amino acids etc that are consumed - our bodies do more than just filter out the wastes and oxygenate it.
>What are the practical barriers to a successful brain transplant?
Hungry zombie nuerosurgeons.
That would be a nifty moniker for a group of musicians.
I’m thinking that the mind has at least a small ability to work around/rewire itself.
Experiments like wearing those ‘upside down’ glasses and how after a couple of days your mind adjusts and sees the world upright again.
And how some stroke victims recover some faculties even after the existing pathways were disrupted.
Or how some of those ‘severed spine’ animals manage to learn how to walk again.
So imagine if you have a goo that allows severed neurons to glue themselves back together. You make a clean slice across the spinal cord of both the head and the recipient body, match the ends up with a good slathering of the goo, and wait for the brain to work it’s magic.
The result might be like being a baby all over again. What happens when this neuron fires? What does it mean when a signal comes in along that pathway? Probably an adult brain can’t handle massive rewiring, but what if the overall geography of neurons in the spinal cord is the same from person to person? It might be possible for the brain to compensate if its ‘just’ a matter of learning that this ‘move’ command is going to the left middle toe instead of the left small toe.
Yepper ! 