Sparks Brain Preservation

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 ...

Andy and I are saying the same thing. Connectomics is the study of the shapes of the membranes of the neurons. Connectomics does not include biomolecular information. That information is very well preserved, but our current technology has trouble deciphering it. So he's saying our current technology...

I think you are misinterpreting current literature. I will use an analogy. Let's say we have a book that we want to preserve. We could cryopreserve the book by soaking the whole thing in cryoprotectant and cooling in liquid nitrogen. For this analogy, we will assume that the text on the pages slight...

I'm glad you're thinking hard about this. Most people take the easy path and just don't even bother. I'm not sure if you've seen this yet: https://www.sparksbrain.org/images/crosslinks400.jpg I created that to help visualize how crosslinking works. The red molecules are formaldehyde. That image show...

If we could grow a new body around an existing brain, we would only be about half-way to the technology we would need for revival. So there would be no point in growing a new body yet because it would be too early. By the time we had the technology to repair a brain, growing the new body would be ve...

I just read up on what "Until" is currently working on. We all know that the long-term solution to the organ shortage will be to grow new organs from stem cells. Let's assume that technology is still 50 years away. If "Until" perfected cryopreservation, it would only be a tempora...

I watched a very long podcast episode with John Smart and Max Marty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhjRzxj6eY John was diving deep into some topics that most people would struggle with but that he clearly thinks about regularly. Max spent a lot of time trying to pin down how John viewed duplicate ...

Cradle has been renamed to "until", https://untillabs.com. They now have $100M to fail with.

Becca Ziegler and Max Marty hosted a discussion on the Cryosphere Discord server on the topic of Chemical Fixation vs. Vitrification https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvu8P9D6p0g There was really only one technical detail that I think didn't get enough attention. They both agreed that perfusion is typ...

We are opening staffed branch offices in SF, L.A., NY, and Atlanta. We also hope to soon open offices in Dallas, Chicago, and Miami. This will put us within a short drive and/or flight of everyone in the US. Finally. It's what I've been trying so hard to do for about 12 years. These will take a litt...

Charles Platt visited us here in Salem and then wrote an article about it in The Biostasis Standard
https://biostasis.substack.com/p/an-alt ... o-cryonics
A vigorous discussion then ensued on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cryonics/comme ... _cryonics/