Sparks Brain Preservation

"If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" is a book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. I read it a while ago, but I ran out of energy at about the 3/4 point, after he started talking about how to fix the problem. The last part wasn't interesting because he thinks there is no solution. And si...

I just noticed this recent talk on the Foresight Institute website: https://foresight.org/resource/autonomous-and-surgery-free-nano-electronics-for-brain-computer-symbiosis/ It was very confusing to me because the speaker mingled current developments with speculative descriptions of technology that ...

Problems with my suggestion: 1. I'm very unclear if the entire brain could be made brittle enough. 2. The rind would need to be completely removed if expansion microscopy turns out to be the winning scanning tech. Removal would be nearly impossible. 3. A lot of robotics would be required. We current...

K. Eric Drexler introduced us to the idea of molecular nanotechnology in his 1986 book, "Engines of Creation". In that book, he invented "nanobots". I just finally had a chance to read his more recent book from 2013, "Radical Abundance". He regrets the nanobot idea and ...

In my recent post about robots, I mentioned this scientific paper regarding parcellation of a fixed brain for the purpose of electron microscope scanning. https://zenodo.org/records/19734168 In that paper, starting on page 11, Helmstaedter describes some details of a parcellation strategy where the ...

And for those who know almost nothing about brain preservation, we now have:
https://www.sparksbrain.org/basicintro.html

That page has now been significantly overhauled to give the basic facts all in one place. This can be a landing page where we can send soon-to-be-former cryonicists.

I've been made aware of another form of degradation that happens quickly. Dr. Andrew McKenzie posted on Substack in May: https://neurobiology.substack.com/ He pointed out that in the paper by Helmstaedter, it was mentioned that some axons are ten times smaller than dendrites in the grey matter and t...

How would the microbots divide up the brain into 1mm cubes exactly? Brain division has always bothered me because of the tremendous damage that would occur along such a cut. Even the finest blade looks like a massive blunt maul at that scale. Using any sort of saw is also completely out of the quest...

We post newsletters every month. https://www.sparksbrain.org/news.html The May newsletter was just posted. We practiced our brain preservation technique on 14 body donors this month. That was out of 25 available weekdays. That's more than one body every two days, a phenomenal pace. That was in addit...

I was fairly surprised when I went to Vitalist Bay conference a few weeks ago by the number of people there and the level of enthusiasm. It was a 4 day event, with biostasis only prominent for about half of one day. Over the 4 days, I believe there were hundreds of speakers. That wasn't the surprisi...

Oh, wait. I just saw in the news the Putin is spending $26 billion to try to grow new organs for himself. I can't think of any good reason why that might not sort of work to maybe buy him a few more years. But it will probably still take well over 40 more years of struggling to be able to grow decen...

I think it's time to remind everyone again that the mainstream consensus on aging is that longevity escape velocity (LEV) is actually not even accepted to be possible at all. It's a fringe idea supported by very few scientists whose timelines are very far outside the mainstream. Just because a few o...

Really? We're talking about perfusion, not immersion. You still don't understand that when fixative is perfused, that it quickly reaches the center of the brain? Isn't that the exact same mechanism that cryonics uses that so impresses you?

Which is exactly why I made this post. The scientific process requires that lay people ignore outliers whose views do not match mainstream consensus. He cannot accurately relay the current mainstream consensus to lay people because he is an outlier. This is extremely important. Credentials alone are...

I think we'll need to get permission of some sort from Texas authorities in order to operate. Maybe other organizations did that already.

We have finally arrived at a point in history where the idea of brain preservation and memory reconstruction is mainstream accepted science. Both the phase 1 preservation and the phase 2 reconstruction of the connectome are already widespread in mainstream labs. There is consensus that memory retrie...

At 22:54 ...membrane properties are preserved also. The membrane acts like a normal membrane. When water goes across it, the cell volume is able to change in response to that. If, for example, the cells had been fixed chemically, the cells wouldn't care what you did to the environment. They'd stay i...

The problem with depending on funeral homes is that rapid response falls short. Immediate perfusion is critical, but cannot be performed in Texas or Florida other than as an embalming. It also depends on people who are not properly trained on our protocols. So it's possible, but not ideal.

I've just enhanced this page with an explanation of why lay people must ignore any scientist who supports cryopreservation without fixation: https://www.sparksbrain.org/scientificBasis.html It's nothing personal. I like them as people. I also have no problem with what they publish because other scie...

Max More just posted an interview video with Dr. Fahy about his cryopreservation paper. https://biostasis.substack.com/p/dr-gregory-fahy-on-major-evidence Most of it was not relevant to what we do, but there were a few interesting moments: 46:26-Max brought up his visit to our facility a week earlie...

In a fixative case where perfusion is used, formalin acts deep in the brain within seconds to minutes. This is not at all unclear. The other numbers you are throwing out are nothing but a red herring aka logical fallacy. Fixative being present is more than adequate to arrest autolysis. I'm actually ...

My core concern is how long synapses remain intact after death. Fundamentally, we don't really know the full answer to that, but I think we have some hints. Here's the sequence of an electrical signal at a synapse: -neuron -long axon -presynaptic bouton -synapse -postsynaptic spine -dendritic tree -...

Chemical fixation quality is better than cryopreservation quality. This is a simple fact with a long history and overwhelming mainstream scientific consensus. Many people who want biological revival are attracted to the shiny promise of reversibility that cryonics seems to offer. Don't get sucked in...

The molecular damage from traditional cryonics is known to be worse. You’ll have entire synapses that have degraded to some degree and might not even be inferable anymore. That’s real damage. But you instead seem to be concerned about hypothetical damage on an extremely small scale. In fixation, the...

You just verified that traditional cryonics takes about six hours until the molecules actually start to get locked in place. I was pretty clear that the rate of deterioration varied dramatically over that time, but it's still 6 hours. In a good case like that, it would be under 5 minutes for aldehyd...

Aldehyde perfusion is not perfect, but the quality is always better than cryopreservation. Every single time. Your logic is just disturbingly wrong. You literally compared a poor aldehyde case with an ideal cryonics case. Here's a side by side comparison of a poor perfusion with aldehyde compared wi...

Welcome, Carrie. Nectome's technical approach is not different. We have been offering services in conjunction with MAiD for about 14 years. We strongly recommend MAiD. It's equivalent to what Nectome is offering. We have also used the median sternotomy approach on many dozens of human donor cases (n...

Max Marty asked me about the problem of the inverse relationship among those who think life extension is imminent and interest in brain preservation. I answered poorly, so let me try again. First of all, I'm not familiar with that relationship. I think people who are interested in life extension are...

It just wrapped up, and it was fun. One thing I was very interested in trying to discover was why some of the scientists were still interested in traditional cryonics rather than chemical fixation. I think we're gradually winning. There was less pushback than before, and we informed them of some det...