Progressive Brain Tissue Replacement Jean Hebert

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Brain plasticity is key to making progressive brain tissue replacement work. Various brain functions can move to different parts of the brain.

Jean Hebert plan would be to grow a new body with gene therapy to knockout brain development. The body would need to be kept on life support for 14-18 years until the skull reached a size suitable for a full brain transplant. The old brain would get sections replaced with new cell created brain cells and tissue. Old brain would removed a piece at a time and brain plasticity would restore functions and personality.

Full body replacement would take about 20 years as your cells would be used as the starting point for the new body (to prevent rejection).

You would need to have about 30 years of normal lifespan left before there would be full body and brain tissue replacement.

6-10 brain replacement surgeries over 20 years would enable full brain replacement. The brainless body would grow on life support until the skull was large enough for transplant. Brain plasticity would be critical to preserving your identity and personality. This is like planning on having 6-10 major strokes every 50 years and fully recovering from them without losing or destroying your personality and having a system for retaining and restoring memories. This is rolling the dice on a process to make your brain into Ship of Theseus. After several decades of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

Something could become immortal but how much of it is still you?

7 thoughts on “Progressive Brain Tissue Replacement Jean Hebert”

  1. I feel like I’m reading about the John Frum “Cargo Cult” … (go ahead, Google it.)

    Notably, the Frummers have been building driftwood replicas of the cargo planes that visited these Vanuatu Islands since oh, WW2 or so. In the context of, “well, cannot we replace part after part, keeping the plane running forever?”, obviously driftwood planes aren’t flying anywhere. In fact, they’ve ‘evolved’ to become Modern Art pieces!

    The point is this, with regard to The Brain — notably YOUR brain — and its intricate parts and pieces: Regardless of how many glib ‘rah-rah-rah’ articles we’ve read, not a single researcher on the planet has even the fuzziest notion of where exact thoughts-and-ideas are ‘stored’ (way too primitive, but still for want of a better word) in YOUR brain.

    Oh, sure … I too was deeply amused with the early filmed open-brain electrical ‘tickling’ experiments, where subjects — ethically having brain surgery for some unrelated but necessary purpose — had permitted researchers to insert incredibly tiny gold wires in the tops of their brains, and activate ever-so-tiny impulses (akin to the natural brain mechanism), whilst talking to the conscious patients. A most amazing recollection of deep-stored memories came gushing forth.

    But notably was also the fact that moving a probe even a millimeter, and the wash of memories was different. Moreover (and I will posit, critically), no active ‘spot’ was ever reactivated after removing the probe, then trying to locate ‘it’ again. Obviously if this were to bolster any conjecture, it might be that no matter how logical we humans (or any animals) appear to be, the mass of connections in the brain is PHYSICALLY almost random, and mechanically disconnected from a psychologist’s attempt to organize the memories and personality of a person.

    JUST as notably, scientific investigation of ‘brain tickling’ also showed that there ARE structures within each brain separating diverse functions physically. In other words, whole sections of every person’s brain are dedicated to visual, to aural, to physical sensations and recollections. Psychologists have also worked out that locational determinism is a real thing for intuitive thinking, for faces identification, for area-of-the-body tactile sensation and so on. Makes sense, because bundles of remote nerve fibers GO to specific areas of the brain stem.

    But in the end, the whole ‘thinking process’, one’s personality, one’s memories, one’s total remembered experience and more critically, the whole learned response framework of one’s mind is both insanely specific (e.g. “Grandmother Neurons”) and hopelessly abstracted — all mixed together, different for every person, on scales apparently of µm.
    ________________________________________

    This is why I was struck by the Cargo Cult similarity. The very notion of chunking out and physically replacing sections of one’s brain and hoping to retain whatever contribution the prior chunks had to one’s mind is like using driftwood to sort-of, kind-of make totem planes per the Frummers. The multilevel shortcoming of the Frummers started in not having even the vaguest idea of the engineering structure of all a plane’s parts. Then, not having the vaguest idea of how to make the components. Then not knowing about the materials, or basically anything else. Hence … driftwood totems or Voodoo dolls of planes.

    Chunking brains and replacing with marvelously crafted new bits is every much as naïve.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  2. So… you chemically knockout your identical twin from birth, raise him in a hospital room, then replace his brain with yours, over and over and over again.
    How is this not evil?

  4. It would probably be easier to grow something akin to a replicant from Blade Runner, as well as to achieve immortality through age reversal, than to achieve immortality in the way described here.

  5. In a massive, windowless warehouse, in row after row, thousands of buff, headless bodies, pumping away on stationary bikes in perfect unison.

    In the dark.

    Actually, they could be used in the same capacity as a Teslabot.

    Working off their “room and board” as they grow up.

    Headless bodies of child-sized clones in bright orange jumpsuits, mechanically packing boxes for Amazon won’t be a bad look because, again, in the dark.

  6. This is unnecessary and potentially sick. The Medical Medium Has Released two brain saver books earlier this year. All is new material he received about how to take care of the brain. Essentially The big problems that the brain develop such as mental, autism and brain aging problems have to do with heavy metal accumulation in the brain. Metals short cut the electricity transmission and flow in the brain. They also heat it up due high electro magnetic activity in the brain and magnetize to attract more heavy metals to the brain. These heavy metals can be moved through cleansing although this process is not easy. Although his sources are divine the information he receives is often in alignment with conventional science but more advanced than it.

  7. Approaching levels of dystopic sci/fi novel from the 60s/70s.

    How long you can take out chunks of your brain, replace them by others and retain what makes you, you?

    I imagine they are assuming continuity of experience/sentience is all that matters. But along the way, the little details and eccentricities that make your personality will erode. And others will probably notice.

    You won’t like the same things nor people, nor have the same attitudes, or even feelings towards those that used to know you. And not just by the natural changes of time, but by having them taken literally out of you.

    At that point, it would be effectively the same as being, well, dead. Someone will live, and will possibly have an overall recollection of the changes. But not the detailed memories, feelings, it won’t be you.

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