Sparks Brain Preservation

Andy and I will both be at the Biostasis Summit in Berkeley on May 17th.
https://www.globalcryonicssummit.com/
No, I can't find any sort of schedule. I think nearly all the biostasis talks are on Sun, 17th.

I think there will be a strong external pressure that will push people to upload much earlier than you might think. That pressure will be fear of biological and nuclear weapons. Nearly every doomsdayer predicts that AI will quickly result in advanced biological weapons, whether from evil countries o...

The regulatory environment seems to be shifting in Texas and Florida over the last few months. Yes, I know that's vague, but that's the best I can do right now. It's changing for the better. Government moves slowly, so I won't really have specifics for a few more months. But it's very exciting.

There's a new long post about Nectome here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3i5GMhpGbDwef9Rns/nectome-all-that-i-know Song says, "I think we will be getting to thousands of preservations per year in a few years". Clearly not. Statements like that make me immediately distrust everything els...

This post is entirely about uploading. If you reject the idea of uploading and prefer to instead be revived biologically, then you might as well stop reading right now. I've always claimed that an upload (or biological revival) would require slicing the brain up into billions of pieces and meticulou...

We're super popular. Not much I can do about it. It does make me happy to see so many bots who think this is interesting. Maybe that results in more people seeing this? Not sure.

Some customers insist on whole body preservation for various reasons. Some of these reasons are technical, such as a desire to preserve the reflex circuits that are present in the spinal cord. Some reasons are rationalistic, such as the argument that if they can afford it, then as much information a...

Texas and Florida present a special challenge for brain preservation services. There are laws on the books in both states that companies may not accept bodies under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) unless they are accredited by the AATB. We will spend the next few years getting accredited, but...

Nectome is another company trying to provide aldehyde fixation services. https://nectome.com/ Aurelia Song (formerly Robert L. McIntyre) was one of the authors on the Aldehyde-stabilized Cryopreservation paper 10 years ago. They have spent the last 10 years working on refinements. Nectome has been a...

I've spent the last few months working on the new locations. I'm going as fast as I can, but I knew it would be a bit slow. One minor problem that I ran into was that there were no ideal properties that exactly matched the parameters I was looking for. I was looking for about 3000 sf in a nice neigh...

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