Sparks Brain Preservation

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.702375v1.full.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email This paper seems to have been eagerly anticipated by some in the cryonics community. At the end of the abstract they describe this paper as the first evidence that ultrastructural integrity...

I think it's worth spending time thinking about how some very dexterous and smart microbots might allow revival. The current bottlenecks that are stopping us from scanning an entire human brain with electron microscopy are AI and microrobotics. We already have the basic scanning technology, but we l...

Our three new ambulances have arrived. Pictures will go up on the website at some point. I'm sort of waiting for the new building sign before getting a new photo. There are still some details to work out with the ambulances. Each ambulance has a liquid waste tank built in, but we still need to desig...

Revival is something I'm sure we all think about a lot. Constantly thinking about it has real utility. Building up a large set of reasonable scenarios gives us a more accurate view of the future than the rest of humanity which is not constantly thinking about revival. Having some sort of big picture...

Apologies to anyone who tried to post within the last week. We were overhauling our network in preparation for our nationwide push. Each remote location needs to be connected to HQ by VPN, so we had to get a new router, add proxies, etc. It caused a few temporary annoyances.

Way to drag up an old post where I was less than accurate :shock:. That's what the cryonics experts had been telling me for years and I have enough humility to strongly defer to experts. But I'm also always open to changing my mind when presented with evidence from other experts. In this case, the n...

And it's been adjusted again to $45k before discount. That includes nationwide rapid response. Yes, I know we keep changing it, but I like to think of it as "further refinement".

Two of the people who submitted their candidacy for the Board did not include their names: chasedenecke and Logan5000. I'm not sure what to do about that. I could probably track them down and email them individually. I assume it will be public knowledge who everyone is, so another option is for them...

I've posted a new page https://www.sparksbrain.org/rapidResponse.html It replaces the previous page about Standby. I'm sort of moving away from the term "standby" because I think that represents an old fashioned all or nothing approach that is expensive, complicated, and generally long dis...

But I think the body would be stored at room temperature while the brain would be stored at freezer temperature.

Medical Aid In Dying (MAID) is having a moment in the spotlight. First Illinois, and now NY. Coincidentally (or not), those are two states where we are currently building facilities. Of our 8 current and planned facilities, that puts 5 in states with MAID, and 3 in states without. If you use MAID in...

Ugh. ChatGPT can just be so dumb sometimes while sounding so smart. It's now admitting that the synapses and connections are stable. But it's still not backing down on its claim of total information loss. I don't really understand that claim. It seems to now be claiming that it's impossible to tell ...

The current scientific understanding of dendritic spine retraction is about 10 years old. Prior to that it would have been more reasonable to think that the synapses persisted for hours, just like the neurons themselves. (this was not in reply to your link above. We posted simultaneously)

I started exploring scenarios where ChatGPT might have gotten it wrong. Like maybe the information is substantially encoded at the epigenetic level and somewhat random individual synapses could be recreated. That's a a hard no. If the spines all completely retract in under 5 minutes due to loss of A...

ChatGPT is doubling down. It claims that after a few minutes of degradation, any residual spine has been reduced to a bump. This represents a complete loss of information because it becomes a one-to-many problem. There is no longer any way to know which bouton the spine remnant previously connected ...

I've just learned from the highly reliable source of ChatGPT that dendritic spines begin retracting within minutes of ischemia and are entirely lost within about an hour. This leaves smooth dendrites, dispersed receptors, debris, and orphaned boutons. This feels like fairly thorough information theo...

We've settled on $60k because we've rolled nationwide standby into that fee. That fee is now live and we are ready to provide that service. We're working on some sort of financial aid form for those who find that to be unaffordable.

Your percentages for warm ischemia seem way off. There is variation between patients, and the death process itself can cause significant damage, but I would tend to have ballpark numbers more like this: 3 hrs warm ischemia: 2% loss 6 hrs warm ischemia: 4% loss 18 hrs warm ischemia: 15% loss The reas...

We decided to set a single uniform fee for simplicity. That strategy has not yet been put to the test of time, so we'll see how that goes. Since we will have 8 facilities, your question could apply to any of the 8 facilities, right? Don't all 8 facilities cost money to keep functional? The one in Sa...

Biological revival is what everyone seems to get excited about, so I made a new page covering it:
https://www.sparksbrain.org/revival.html

I thought Alcor was hearing cracks in all of their cases when they were using the crackphone. I could be misremembering. With such a large block of tissue, I would not be surprised, but I also don't think it would cause very much damage. A crack is generally one of the least significant kinds of dam...

Alcor and CI both use padding for storage in liquid nitrogen, just like we do. Yes, I've always been willing to shift my position when presented with new evidence. In this case, the evidence has come largely from Andy reviewing huge numbers of scientific papers and pointing out to me that my previou...

After thinking about it for a few more hours, I'm less concerned about the brains stored in fixative. The density of the brain would be very similar to the density of the liquid, so it would be well protected. But we will still look into improvements of course.

Let's start with the brains that are in liquid nitrogen. Those are the ones I've been thinking about for the longest. They will be fine. They are all individually wrapped in padding. But I have not spent as many years thinking about storage in fixative, and it seems that I overlooked some details. I...

The Cascadia earthquake is a non-issue. Risk = Severity x Frequency. With a frequency of once every 400 years, the risk is therefore extremely low. If we had that earthquake right now, I estimate tens of thousands of deaths along the Oregon Coast from the tsunami. But here in the valley, 50 miles aw...

I take it back. Fees will certainly not go down with economies of scale. Instead, response time will go down. Locations will be added in Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Washington DC, Boston, etc, etc. Granted, we're a long way off from any of that, but it helps to plan very far ahead so w...

I would also like to point out that providing standby is much easier when it's a short drive for employees rather than a flight. They don't have to be very far from home and they can rotate through as needed. Our procedures can be performed very well by one or two people, so a standby is not the mas...

I've worked out a general plan for our fees over the next few years. Membership fees won't change. I like a nice stable and reasonable membership fee. But our preservation fee is going to need to go up significantly. As our nationwide locations get remodeled and staffed, the fee will need to reflect...

We do know that long term memories are stored in some sort of molecular structure that is durable enough to last more than a few hours. Aldehyde fixation is, therefore, preserving those memories. It doesn't really matter what the structures are. You've listed some things that you think are getting d...

Postponing these considerations will be required because of low tech. If all we have is microrobots and not nanobots, we won't be anywhere close to being able to upload. It would be too soon to worry about revival. Most of this post seems to be about how to revive earlier. Our little ape brains are ...