X-Message-Number: 5000
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #4978 - #4985
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 13:22:07 -0700 (PDT)

i


Greetings again.

I note Brian Wowk's comment about "removing a few microliters of gray matter".
Don't do it. The  more we find out about how our brains work, the more we
discover that all the different parts play significant roles. Not only that,
but our memories are unlikely to be stored as in a hologram. Instead they 
would be distributed with, say, our memories of colors near the brain 
areas involved in seeing colors, and our memories of taste near the brain 
areas involved in perceiving taste.

As a suggestion this one seems extraordinarily reckless, at least now. I do
think that someday we will know enough about our brains to be able to say:
such and such an area does only stereotyped functions common to all human
beings (or to a large subset). If we remove it then it can be easily 
replaced. But we aren't yet at that point. (Of all the different candidates
for such areas, I'd actually say our hippocampus came first --- but again,
I still wouldn't want my hippocampus removed at our present state of 
knowledge). 

As for loss of memory, what would happen with someone who had been frozen
and then revived is unlikely to match any clinical condition we see now. 
This is because we can expect that they will come back with a fully working,
repaired brain. But that hardly means that they will still have their 
memories. All the machinery to access memory and acquire it will be in good
shape --- but they could end up with very few memories to access in the first
place.
			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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