X-Message-Number: 11615
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 21:23:32 +0400
From: "Mikhail V. Soloviev" <>
Subject: Conditional reflexes after freezing-thawing (references needed)

Some days ago I discussed cryonics with Svyatoslav
Medvedev, the director (CEO) of the Institute of
Human Brain (St. Petesburg, Russia) and a son of
famous brain researcher Natalia Bekhtereva, who is
a grand-daughter of great Russian psychiatrist
Vladimir Bekhterev.

Dr. Medvedev told me that he doesn't believe in
cryonics as from the theory, he helds, it follows
that memory should be desroyed by freezing.

According to this theory the long-term memory is
written not in brain structure (synaptic pattern
etc.), but in functional states of neurons (e.g.
in the pattern of soma polarization). And any hard
stress (e.g. during clinical death or freezing) is
able to erase the long-term memory.

But he offered me to prove that the long-term memory
is not erased by freezing. He thinks that such proof
could be the demonstration that conditional reflexes
are preserved after freezing (to temperature about 0 
degrees C) and thawing of some higher animals -- e.g. 
of gold hamsters.

Do anybody know about similar experiments (where the
problem of preservation of conditional reflexes after 
freezing was researched)?


-- Mikhail Soloviev


P.S. According to my opinion any change of brain dynamics
is accompanied by the change of corresponded structures.
And if some structures are destroyed by stress it could
infered from other structures (by logic operations, by
combinatory search etc.).

Example of combinatory search to reconstruct the erased 
pattern of soma polarization:

(1) Original pattern of soma polarization

++--++
+-+-++
-+----
+--++-

(2) Pattern is erased by freezing

------
------
------
------

(3) After reanimation soma is depolarized externally to
find the pattern that fits the original description of
personality of frozen patients: steps (a), (b), (c)

(a)

----+-
+----+
-+-+--
+---+-

(b)

-+--++
+-+-+-
-+----
+--++-

(c)

++--++
+-+-++
-+----
+--++-

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