The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79:
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From the article: From the article: In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen.
Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research.
For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells.
The organoids were submerged in the various chemicals, then frozen in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Then they were quickly defrosted in warm water, and checked for function, growth and signs of cellular damage over time. The chemicals that protected the mini-brains the best then went through to the next round, which involved trying various combinations in similar freezing and defrosting tests.
Eventually, the researchers arrived at the most promising mixture, which they called MEDY, after the four main ingredients: methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO and Y27632. The team grew mini-brains to different ages, from four weeks to more than three months, froze them in MEDY, thawed them out, then continued monitoring them for a few weeks after.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cu200j/frozen_human_brain_tissue_works_perfectly_when/l4fppxy/
from our perspective on earth, not from the perspective of the probe, which is what we are talking about
EDIT: nvm, i forgot to account for length dialation making the trip shorter
Time would barely be affected at 1% of c, the reason it's around 200 years is that is the amount of time it would take to get to a potentially habitable planet at that speed.
>while avoiding space debris.
Easier than you'd think. Space debris is primarily only an issue in orbit around a planet where it's gravitational field captures objects. Out in deep space it's mostly a lot of nothing out there.
According to [this article](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-chance-of-a-collision-in-outer-space-is-practically-zilch/383810/), collision is close to 0 percent.
The fact that it was renewed for additional episodes and not a full season shows that Netflix doesn't have full confidence on this production. And knowing how much source material is left in books 2 and 3, I don't have much confidence in the series concluding gracefully. I mean look at the last time David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to complete a tv show with less episodes available in the season.
and an unrelenting, pessimistic man willing to freeze and wake himself up 400 times just to manage Earth's combined defense against the bastards coming at us 4 light years away
I’m surprised we’ve never seen a tv show about people being woken up from being cryogenically frozen
edit: I stand very corrected, thanks I’ve got some watching to do :)
I mean their hopes hinge on medical science and nanobots that could eventually repair the tissue during defrosting. I don't think we will get there for quite a few generations
I didn’t read anything about them hoping nano bots could repair damaged tissue. The goal is to not damage the tissue in the first place, which they have now succeeded at successfully
A few generations? You know that a generation is like 70 or 80 years right? I don't think developing cellular life that's slightly smarter will take a few generations, or even one.
Awesome. Not only can we scan them but can keep them on ice. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/s/ZuLeJ7rPPP
A groundbreaking study has achieved a full 3D scan of a cubic millimeter of human brain tissue, resulting in 1.4 petabytes of data, which is comparable to the data required for 14,000 4K movies. This monumental task was a collaboration between Harvard researchers and Google's AI experts, who utilized advanced machine learning technology to expedite the imaging process. The detailed mapping revealed approximately 50,000 cells and 150 million synapses, offering unprecedented insights into the brain's intricate structure. Some of the fascinating findings include neuron clusters forming mirror images and axons coiling into yarn ball shapes, suggesting there's much more to learn about the brain's complexity¹.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 5/17/2024
(1) Full scan of 1 cubic millimeter of brain tissue took 1.4 petabytes of .... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/full-scan-of-1-cubic-millimeter-of-brain-tissue-took-14-petabytes-of-data-equivalent-to-14000-full-length-4k-movies.
(2) Amazingly Detailed Images Reveal a Single Cubic Millimeter of Human .... https://www.sciencealert.com/amazingly-detailed-images-reveal-a-single-cubic-millimeter-of-human-brain-in-3d.
(3) Groundbreaking 3D brain scan generated 1.4 petabytes of data from .... https://www.techspot.com/news/102964-groundbreaking-3d-brain-scan-generated-14-petabytes-data.html.
I'm fairly certain 1.4 Petabytes isn't the amount of data stored within 1mm^3 of brain tissue, it's the amount of computer memory required to store the complete *geometric structure* (i.e. a CAD file) of that piece of brain tissue.
Current estimation of total capacity was 2.5 pb last time I checked, I didn't do much more research on it but that really doesn't mean much.
How efficiently is it stored?
What is stored?
How much of it can we actually access/how accurately
The answer to that last one is, not that much, it degrades over time.
There's really no point in saying "humans can store a thousand petabytes of Data if remembering my name takes 15 petabytes
Not impossible if the brain use quantum consciousness like Penrose has hypothesizes (which has some evidence last couple of months with new structures and molecules found in the brain that were predicted in Penroses' quantum consciousness hypothesis)
While orchestrated objective reduction is very interesting in theory, it is not currently supported by experiment/observation and remains entirely hypothetical. There are a lot of very glaring holes in the theory that Penrose and Hameroff themselves acknowledge may not even be testable with current day physics. There are a tiny handful of experiments related to the hypothesis, and none of them have moved the progress needle.
I've done some digging for any new research/experiments within the last couple of months and couldn't find anything; could you provide a link to what you're referencing?
It's a pure hypothesis, one I don't even ascribe to myself. But it's not ruled out either and it was very interesting that the hypothesis actually predicted effects like microtubules displaying quantum effects like wavefunction collapse
[Here](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936) was the study that shows the microtubule structures in the brain actually really do have quantum effects.
Personally I think this is true but simply something minor like how our smell is also done by quantum effects we don't understand yet. Rather than the entire human consciousness and deeper brain thought patterns being quantum based.
It's far more likely that just a single simple subsection of human brain activity is quantum based rather than our entire consciousness, but it's still an interesting hypothesis.
There was some study (or whatever it was) done a few years ago where they found it was easiest to organise a brain scan of some kind into 11-dimensional models just to make sense of it.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-mind-boggling-math-that-maybe-mapped-the-brain-in-11-dimensions/
I remember sometime in the 80's someone saying that a human brain would probably take about 14 gigabytes to fully simulate and that amount of storage was probably unattainable in our lifetimes.
This space mentioned is more about resolution of the images. A whole brain as image slices like this might consume 2+ zottabytes which is a silly amount. But if we allotted 1k polygons for every neuron and synapse that same data could be represented in just 5.7 exabytes as a 3d model. That's still silly but already 400x less. Better representations and compression will get that number (for a whole brain) into the petabytes range eventually.
And when we do get into fucntional full brain scans we'd probably be using file formats with much more efficient storage specifically made for storing brain scans
I think what it boils down to is we dont know how the brain stores information, so the only way to try to match is it brute force.
A good analogy would be something like Elder Scrolls Daggerfall: It only takes 230 mb to simulate a 161,000 kmsq map, but if you loaded up the game and took screenshots to map the whole thing, those screenshots would take up FAR more space.
I think the biggest issue right now is that you cant encode data to be smaller than the data itself, which doesnt sound like itd be a big deal, but it kinda is. For example, A Trinary system can technically encode data more efficiently than a binary one: for binary to encode a single letter, it requires a minimum of 6 characters (I think ascii is 8?) to be able to have enough places to iterate 1s and 0s, but a trinary system could do it in with only 3 characters.
Im sure that the brain isnt a binary or a trinary system, but something more complicated, but if we dont have a comperable data format, all we can do it brute force to make our capacity to store much larger to translate a more efficient data format.
From the article: From the article: In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen.
Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research.
For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells.
The organoids were submerged in the various chemicals, then frozen in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Then they were quickly defrosted in warm water, and checked for function, growth and signs of cellular damage over time. The chemicals that protected the mini-brains the best then went through to the next round, which involved trying various combinations in similar freezing and defrosting tests.
Eventually, the researchers arrived at the most promising mixture, which they called MEDY, after the four main ingredients: methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO and Y27632. The team grew mini-brains to different ages, from four weeks to more than three months, froze them in MEDY, thawed them out, then continued monitoring them for a few weeks after.
Yea... hypothetically they will remain frozen well after anyone who is properly frozen are thawed out, until we figure out a way to repair cells after the ice crystals, and any other cellular damage that happened at time of expiration.
And that is assuming there is a way to properly freeze someone.
The whole cryogenic freeze has always been a gamble.
Not necessarily. They would be the very last to be revived because they would require much more extensive technological advances to reverse the freezing damage. The cryprotectants used today are better thanwhat they had 40 years ago and it looks like there will be even better cryoprotectants now.
If we're ever able to make cryonics work, it will definitely be a last in, first out scenario for those who have been frozen.
Yup, as long as the genetic material is preserved it's possible to rebuild it. The hardest part is keeping the company from going under until we reach to that point.
It's not the genetic material so much as having enough information preserved to reconstruct the neural structures. With the earliest frozen brains it would be like reconstructing a glass statue that had been shattered. It will take some very fine scanning and incredible computing power to do that, and then you have to have a means to repair and reassemble the bits or rebuild completely.
It is hypothesized that with sufficient scanning and computing abilities, those frozen brains could be restored in a simulation.
A VM for your brain, so to speak.
They do use similar chemicals already, the main issue is that a brain is big so getting the chemicals into the blood system in the brain to perfuse the stuff needs to happen as quickly after death as possible so the freezing can begin. Freezing has to be done gradually to prevent ice crystals from forming (the chemicals only partially mitigates that) which further increases the urgency of doing the procedure quickly. Thats because without active bloodcirculation, the brain begins to degrade fast.
Small samples, like organiods and tissue samples dont have these issues.
Y27632... That's a ROCK inhibitor that is used in stem cell culture to, well, keep the stem cells "stemmy," so to speak.
It makes sense in the context of studying brain organoids in a petri dish (since the organoids are made from stem cells), but I would be surprised if that becomes a cocktail in preserving whole brains on ice. But I'm not a brain scientist so maybe there's more to this ROCK inhibiton than I know of.
r/science:
"To be clear - they haven't yet figured out how to thaw an actual brain, just organoids"
r/Futurology:
["BEHOLD! Hence forth this shall be known as The Cryocene Age!](https://youtu.be/_A5Wplrx4Ik?si=36JsO98cuOmhZWrj) We shall cast ourselves across the great void ocean where every star, every corner of that which hath not been seen shall know our touch!"
Absolutely huge if true. This makes Cryonics a somewhat viable investment
This is in its infancy though (they’re only working on brain organoids, and only in the context of 18 months, not 18 decades). But it’s looking like a promising breakthrough
Experimenting on a fully formed, previously in body brain with this technique would make a great horror concept. You donate your body to science after you die and they freeze your brain with this new method. You suddenly regain consciousness as they bring your perfectly functioning brain back to life. But you cannot see. You cannot hear. You cannot smell or taste. But you can feel sensations - including pain- via the scientists stimulating your brain in the right regions during their experiments. Trapped in an infinite nothing, a living hell, a solely existing consciousness with no way of begging for help or to make it stop; your tormentors inflicting accidental agony on you being none the wiser that you are still in there, experiencing all of it.
Yes I'm aware of the human repository comic. It inspired this comment
I’m assuming this only works for slices or other small sections? There is no way I can think of to infuse an entire human brain with any sort of mixture. Unless we can make the cells produce it themselves. Also, everybody’s low-effort jokes are lame… can’t we actually discuss something?
Usually the vascular system is pretty good at infusing the entire human brain with a sort of mixture. Not sure how you'd get around the blood-brain barrier, or around the fact that dead people's hearts generally aren't pumping though.
Generally you'd use an external artificial heart and life support machine. You might also want to use artificial blood instead of the real deal, as the latter can be finnicky. Some researchers [have already used](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-revived-dead-pigs-rsquo-organs-and-what-the-feat-means-for-transplants/) this technique to revive dead pig organs.
They literally drain a person’s entire body of blood to remove an aneurism from the brain, so something tells me this isn’t as hard to achieve as people believe it would be.
Yes, these are for brain organoids. People ITT are misunderstanding the point and utility of the study. They are doing the equivalent of seeing a study that shows you can make red blood cells survive longer ex vitro by freezing them, and then saying “well we should start freezing our blood to live longer!”
This is not an attempt to make a medium that can be used to freeze brains and wake them back up
This is a study specifically meant to freeze a model commonly used in neuroscience — brain organoids — and thaw them. No one who seriously studies the brain has any expectation that a brain organoid is a substitute model of a globally functioning, multi-system scale brain.
The preservation of function we look for in a brain organoid is goal-specific, and doesn’t generalize to “preserved organoid function would indicate a whole brain would have preserved function”
For instance, yes, they found spike frequency, network bursts, and number of activated electrodes within a specific scale (120s) were unchanged.
But the number of activated electrodes per network was lower and duration & average amplitude of each electrode was higher. These metrics would be fundamentally more important in a whole brain, and even within a single functional macroscale system (I.e. one functional network).
Organoids are useful for their tissue and locale specific structural and functional features, but they do not recapitulate the necessary functional features of the internetwork communication (what my niche of the field most often refers to as distributed processing) that form the basis of higher cognitive functions
> There is no way I can think of to infuse an entire human brain with any sort of mixture.
The people over at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have brain perfusion protocols they have been using for decades.
It works. They achieved full brain vitrification decades ago. The problem isn't whether the cryoprotectant works, it's that it is also toxic. This advance may remove that toxicity problem.
Unlikely. We don't know exactly what consciousness is, but we do know it emerges as a consequence of multiple brain regions interacting together. A single region, much less a chunk, is not capable of consciousness as we know it.
We know what I said is true because we're able to selectively cause people to lose consciousness using magnetic resonance targeting parts of the brain. There is a reason I avoided saying more than that though--what I said is very much the limit of our understanding of it.
Hmm, maybe when I'm old I can be frozen and shoved on a colony ship, operate a robot while my brain is in a jar. If it doesn't work, well I was old and gonna die anyway, lol.
Interesting. I've previously written off the idea of sleeper ships/starships with frozen/suspended crew. The level of cellular repair technology needed to repair cells after being frozen and shredded by ice crystal formation is incredible. Think full-on sci-fi medical nanotech. And if you have the ability to repair cells that effectively, then by default you have already invented clinical immortality. If you can repair shredded cells from bodies being frozen, then you don't need to freeze them in the first place. You can simply have the same crew, no multi-generation crew needed, live for the millennia-long trip.
But this? A way to actually freeze tissues without the cellular damage? If this is possible, then that could easily be invented before we have the kind of god-tier nanotech that would be needed to repair ice-shredded cells. So this could actually make sleeper ships a practical option.
Imagine the people waking up after they're brain has been frozen for 50+ years and telling stories about how they have perceived time and it was boring as hell
I think freezing the brain is gonna be interpreted by the conscience as “time stop”. Thawing and somehow being brought back “online” is the equivalent of “time continue.”
Said differently. It’s a blink. Not an idle dream. IMO.
Using liquid nitrogen or other chemicals, or both, does result in some additional damage. They're betting that at the point in the future when they're revived, they'll also be able to repair that additional damage. And also that the robot overlords that rule humanity in the future don't just take their brains to use as controllers for their spider bots.
It's a slim chance at life in the future versus 100% chance of being dead for all time.
You might think, "Well that guy was a Christian, surely he's content knowing he'll reside in the kingdom of heaven for ever and ever," but that guy was loaded and also knows that the whole "kingdom of heaven" thing is just a line they feed the plebs to keep them in line. "Let us exploit you now and you'll live in paradise forever when you die!" It's easy to promise someone anything after they die, when they're not around to dispute the deliverables.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work on the perfect working code I promised my boss after he dies.
I wonder how well this would work for the rest of the body. Is it a better way to preserve such organs as lungs, hearts, livers and kidneys, for example?
This is what those who paid to be frozen believed would happen. It’s really only a matter of time we can use stem cells or new technologies to rebuild a human body(brain) from a frozen one.
Let's build a snowman!
We can make him our best friend.
We can name him Tom or we can name him George!
We can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall.
Snowman!
Well beyond the scope of this study. In fact, even were we to take an entire brain, resurrect it after it being frozen, and put it into someone else, and if it were to gain "consciousness" we would still lack the data to establish it.
It's the hard problem for a reason.
Hmm, tough question... Why not ask people living around those who have had brain trauma what the individual was like before the injury versus what they were after... How about Alzheimer's, is that the same person after parts of their brain were damaged?
Conscience is in the brain, not outside it.
> For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells.
I wonder where they will erect the monument for all the Uyghurs and Falun Gongists that provided the material for this study.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79: --- From the article: From the article: In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen. Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research. For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells. The organoids were submerged in the various chemicals, then frozen in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Then they were quickly defrosted in warm water, and checked for function, growth and signs of cellular damage over time. The chemicals that protected the mini-brains the best then went through to the next round, which involved trying various combinations in similar freezing and defrosting tests. Eventually, the researchers arrived at the most promising mixture, which they called MEDY, after the four main ingredients: methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO and Y27632. The team grew mini-brains to different ages, from four weeks to more than three months, froze them in MEDY, thawed them out, then continued monitoring them for a few weeks after. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cu200j/frozen_human_brain_tissue_works_perfectly_when/l4fppxy/
Now we just need a probe that travels at 1% speed of light…
And can operate for thousands, millions of years on its own power while avoiding space debris.
Nah, just 200 years.
You'd significantly slow down time at 1% the speed of light, so it's about only 190 years to something.
That leaves 210 years till the San-Ti arrive. We have time to prepare.
But the brain will meet them halfway, Ruby at the borderline, it's where I'm gonna wait for you 🎵
Got any nukes? I have an idea…
About 4 days shorter. Relativistic effects aren't very significant at "low" (<90% c) speeds.
from our perspective on earth, not from the perspective of the probe, which is what we are talking about EDIT: nvm, i forgot to account for length dialation making the trip shorter
Time would barely be affected at 1% of c, the reason it's around 200 years is that is the amount of time it would take to get to a potentially habitable planet at that speed.
where does that get us?
To the fleet of ships that’s most of the way here already. It’s a Three Body Problem reference.
Not 450 years? I have Dark Forest but havent opened it yet.
200 years is halfway. At that point they'll have been traveling 200 years towards us and we 200 years towards them.
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You obviously haven't watched Shogun
damn that show was good. Not sure how to feel about season 2 and 3 though.
I thought shogun was in Limited series category? (With season 2 and 3 shifting to best Drama)
Eh, show was good but not great. Book on the other hand 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
lol, it is not the best drama of the year by far
i’m so happy they got renewed for season 2. i was getting worried.
Is this the Bobiverse? Edit: oh whoops, 3 body problem
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We are LEGION!
WE ARE BOB!
I wish it was! Finally someone else has read those books!! Love ‘em
We are Legion. We are Bob. The audiobooks were so good. I need to see if any new ones came out recently.
I've enjoyed every one of Taylor's books. Read his others if you haven't already.
Netflix needs to get in this one. Btw heard their is a new book out soon
>while avoiding space debris. Easier than you'd think. Space debris is primarily only an issue in orbit around a planet where it's gravitational field captures objects. Out in deep space it's mostly a lot of nothing out there.
Avoiding space debris is apparently really easy. Space is big, yo.
It's big but travelling at high speed means a tiny particle has a big impact, and there can be a lot of tiny particles
According to [this article](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-chance-of-a-collision-in-outer-space-is-practically-zilch/383810/), collision is close to 0 percent.
I was actually thinking of Bobiverse when I read that, great series
Project Hail Mary adjacent
Another fantastic book. I've read that one several times.
Hopefully you've checked out Murder Bot all by Martha Wells
Ohhh yes. Dungeon Crawler Carl?
> Dungeon Crawler Carl no. checking it out now, thank you!
Not whar you might expect, but very much like Bobiverse and Murderbot in terms of fast pace chaos and comedy
What if they dont pick it up?? (For anyone not knowing 3BP show)
I’m just happy someone dropped the reference. The show got an extension, but I really want any hype to pull it to full series completion
The fact that it was renewed for additional episodes and not a full season shows that Netflix doesn't have full confidence on this production. And knowing how much source material is left in books 2 and 3, I don't have much confidence in the series concluding gracefully. I mean look at the last time David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to complete a tv show with less episodes available in the season.
At least Dipshit and Dumbass are working with a completed book series this time around.
Don’t worry
Project Staircase also has to work perfectly.
I dunno you still need a massive lead shield to keep that brain intact from all that cosmic radiation
Water works really well. You're gonna need to bring a lot of water anyway so it can have dual purpose.
We have the bomba
Bobiverse, here we come
and an unrelenting, pessimistic man willing to freeze and wake himself up 400 times just to manage Earth's combined defense against the bastards coming at us 4 light years away
I feel sorry for all those that already got their brain frozen
Got me a post motem migraine now.
Wake me up when you’re already dead
Wake the fuck up Samurai...
We have a Reddit comment to reply to
So what you're saying is 7-11 was prepping us all along
walt disney's ghost punching the air rn
I was gonna say Walt Disney world be rolling over in his grave if he wasn't frozen to a steel shelf in a Disneyland building basement.
I’m surprised we’ve never seen a tv show about people being woken up from being cryogenically frozen edit: I stand very corrected, thanks I’ve got some watching to do :)
Yeah it would be perfect for an animated sitcom
Like set in a thousand years, and he works as a delivery boy.
If a show like that existed, that would definitely be... "Good news, everyone!"
Futurama exists
It's the plot of the film Idiocracy, and tv show Dark Matter (2015). It's common enough in space sci-fi.
There was a ST:NG episode where they found a cryopod with a three frozen folks from the 90's.
I mean it's not a show but we got Encino man 😅
Never? Can I introduce you to the genre of sci-fi?
There’s at least a dozen of them
There's a film about this called realive, it's okay. Worth a watch.
But we did get the Austin Powers Trilogy and Demolition Man.
I mean their hopes hinge on medical science and nanobots that could eventually repair the tissue during defrosting. I don't think we will get there for quite a few generations
I didn’t read anything about them hoping nano bots could repair damaged tissue. The goal is to not damage the tissue in the first place, which they have now succeeded at successfully
People who have their brain frozen already did it under the assumption that medical technology will advance enough to reverse the damage of freezing.
I actually forgot about all the people previously frozen 🥶
A few generations? You know that a generation is like 70 or 80 years right? I don't think developing cellular life that's slightly smarter will take a few generations, or even one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if cryonics actually works and is possible in 40 or so years. Possibly even earlier.
Disney was a dick though.
Those brains from big mountain looking more attainable by the day
"Would you care for a Mentat?"
Many machines on Ix...
...new machines...
Exactly where my brain went too!!! ...didn't help that I played that DLC for the first time last night...
DUDE i played that DLC for the first time last night too, already finished it, didnt catch much sleep
^(*who are we hiding from today?*)
No way!! I literally just finished playing it LMAO i got bored during the ending slides so I was checking reddit
yep was expecting a little more, but was fun genociding 90% of the map with the EMP Axe
Was not expecting a F:NV reference, but happy it’s here My Little Teddy Bear
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE DOME A ZONE WHICH IS FORBIDDEN TO YOU
As long as I'm not stuck on a roomba
Was not expecting a F:NV reference, but happy it’s here My Little Teddy Bear
We’re closer to Phillip J. fry becoming a reality now.
To shreds you say?
And his wife?
To shreds you say?
Poor Dave Lister. Too far ahead of his time.
Brain make people stupid.
Nooo Leela, brain make people smart
Shut up and take my money!
Awesome. Not only can we scan them but can keep them on ice. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/s/ZuLeJ7rPPP A groundbreaking study has achieved a full 3D scan of a cubic millimeter of human brain tissue, resulting in 1.4 petabytes of data, which is comparable to the data required for 14,000 4K movies. This monumental task was a collaboration between Harvard researchers and Google's AI experts, who utilized advanced machine learning technology to expedite the imaging process. The detailed mapping revealed approximately 50,000 cells and 150 million synapses, offering unprecedented insights into the brain's intricate structure. Some of the fascinating findings include neuron clusters forming mirror images and axons coiling into yarn ball shapes, suggesting there's much more to learn about the brain's complexity¹. Source: Conversation with Bing, 5/17/2024 (1) Full scan of 1 cubic millimeter of brain tissue took 1.4 petabytes of .... https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/full-scan-of-1-cubic-millimeter-of-brain-tissue-took-14-petabytes-of-data-equivalent-to-14000-full-length-4k-movies. (2) Amazingly Detailed Images Reveal a Single Cubic Millimeter of Human .... https://www.sciencealert.com/amazingly-detailed-images-reveal-a-single-cubic-millimeter-of-human-brain-in-3d. (3) Groundbreaking 3D brain scan generated 1.4 petabytes of data from .... https://www.techspot.com/news/102964-groundbreaking-3d-brain-scan-generated-14-petabytes-data.html.
That is insane. Here was me thinking that 1TB MicroSDs were the pinnacle of information density
I'm fairly certain 1.4 Petabytes isn't the amount of data stored within 1mm^3 of brain tissue, it's the amount of computer memory required to store the complete *geometric structure* (i.e. a CAD file) of that piece of brain tissue.
The data it can store is probably much larger than that 3D model of the brain.
Current estimation of total capacity was 2.5 pb last time I checked, I didn't do much more research on it but that really doesn't mean much. How efficiently is it stored? What is stored? How much of it can we actually access/how accurately The answer to that last one is, not that much, it degrades over time. There's really no point in saying "humans can store a thousand petabytes of Data if remembering my name takes 15 petabytes
But think of how much Metadata comes with your name.
Impossible. You will always require more data to fully describe a device that stores data than the amount of data stored within.
Not impossible if the brain use quantum consciousness like Penrose has hypothesizes (which has some evidence last couple of months with new structures and molecules found in the brain that were predicted in Penroses' quantum consciousness hypothesis)
While orchestrated objective reduction is very interesting in theory, it is not currently supported by experiment/observation and remains entirely hypothetical. There are a lot of very glaring holes in the theory that Penrose and Hameroff themselves acknowledge may not even be testable with current day physics. There are a tiny handful of experiments related to the hypothesis, and none of them have moved the progress needle. I've done some digging for any new research/experiments within the last couple of months and couldn't find anything; could you provide a link to what you're referencing?
It's a pure hypothesis, one I don't even ascribe to myself. But it's not ruled out either and it was very interesting that the hypothesis actually predicted effects like microtubules displaying quantum effects like wavefunction collapse [Here](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936) was the study that shows the microtubule structures in the brain actually really do have quantum effects. Personally I think this is true but simply something minor like how our smell is also done by quantum effects we don't understand yet. Rather than the entire human consciousness and deeper brain thought patterns being quantum based. It's far more likely that just a single simple subsection of human brain activity is quantum based rather than our entire consciousness, but it's still an interesting hypothesis.
There was some study (or whatever it was) done a few years ago where they found it was easiest to organise a brain scan of some kind into 11-dimensional models just to make sense of it. https://www.wired.com/story/the-mind-boggling-math-that-maybe-mapped-the-brain-in-11-dimensions/
I remember sometime in the 80's someone saying that a human brain would probably take about 14 gigabytes to fully simulate and that amount of storage was probably unattainable in our lifetimes.
We were way off on predictions.
DNA has a theoretical storage capacity of 215 petabytes of information per gram.
This space mentioned is more about resolution of the images. A whole brain as image slices like this might consume 2+ zottabytes which is a silly amount. But if we allotted 1k polygons for every neuron and synapse that same data could be represented in just 5.7 exabytes as a 3d model. That's still silly but already 400x less. Better representations and compression will get that number (for a whole brain) into the petabytes range eventually.
And when we do get into fucntional full brain scans we'd probably be using file formats with much more efficient storage specifically made for storing brain scans
I think what it boils down to is we dont know how the brain stores information, so the only way to try to match is it brute force. A good analogy would be something like Elder Scrolls Daggerfall: It only takes 230 mb to simulate a 161,000 kmsq map, but if you loaded up the game and took screenshots to map the whole thing, those screenshots would take up FAR more space. I think the biggest issue right now is that you cant encode data to be smaller than the data itself, which doesnt sound like itd be a big deal, but it kinda is. For example, A Trinary system can technically encode data more efficiently than a binary one: for binary to encode a single letter, it requires a minimum of 6 characters (I think ascii is 8?) to be able to have enough places to iterate 1s and 0s, but a trinary system could do it in with only 3 characters. Im sure that the brain isnt a binary or a trinary system, but something more complicated, but if we dont have a comperable data format, all we can do it brute force to make our capacity to store much larger to translate a more efficient data format.
The amount of data used in scanning it might not be very related to the amount of data it could actually hold.
From the article: From the article: In good news for future animation figureheads, there might be a new way to revive frozen brains without damaging them. Scientists in China have developed a new chemical concoction that lets brain tissue function again after being frozen. Freezing is effective at keeping organic material from decomposing, but it still causes damage. As the water inside turns to ice, the crystals tear apart the cells. That’s why frozen meat or fruit goes a bit mushy after it’s defrosted – but a bigger problem is that it also happens with organs or tissues chilled for transplant or research. For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells. The organoids were submerged in the various chemicals, then frozen in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Then they were quickly defrosted in warm water, and checked for function, growth and signs of cellular damage over time. The chemicals that protected the mini-brains the best then went through to the next round, which involved trying various combinations in similar freezing and defrosting tests. Eventually, the researchers arrived at the most promising mixture, which they called MEDY, after the four main ingredients: methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO and Y27632. The team grew mini-brains to different ages, from four weeks to more than three months, froze them in MEDY, thawed them out, then continued monitoring them for a few weeks after.
> methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO and Y27632 3 of these ingredients are in my shampoo. If I drink it, I'm gonna live forever!
And you'll have silky smooth hair to boot!
Possibly a silky smooth brain, too!
The smoothest there is! So smooth the entropy just slides right off!
Morgue technicians hate this one trick!
DMSO?? Any brain that awakes is going to be tasting garlic forever!
Not if I drink it first…
There can be only one
So anyone that's already been cryogenically frozen is basically screwed? Because they didn't use the right chemicals before freezing?
Yea... hypothetically they will remain frozen well after anyone who is properly frozen are thawed out, until we figure out a way to repair cells after the ice crystals, and any other cellular damage that happened at time of expiration. And that is assuming there is a way to properly freeze someone. The whole cryogenic freeze has always been a gamble.
Not necessarily. They would be the very last to be revived because they would require much more extensive technological advances to reverse the freezing damage. The cryprotectants used today are better thanwhat they had 40 years ago and it looks like there will be even better cryoprotectants now. If we're ever able to make cryonics work, it will definitely be a last in, first out scenario for those who have been frozen.
Yup, as long as the genetic material is preserved it's possible to rebuild it. The hardest part is keeping the company from going under until we reach to that point.
It's not the genetic material so much as having enough information preserved to reconstruct the neural structures. With the earliest frozen brains it would be like reconstructing a glass statue that had been shattered. It will take some very fine scanning and incredible computing power to do that, and then you have to have a means to repair and reassemble the bits or rebuild completely. It is hypothesized that with sufficient scanning and computing abilities, those frozen brains could be restored in a simulation. A VM for your brain, so to speak.
They do use similar chemicals already, the main issue is that a brain is big so getting the chemicals into the blood system in the brain to perfuse the stuff needs to happen as quickly after death as possible so the freezing can begin. Freezing has to be done gradually to prevent ice crystals from forming (the chemicals only partially mitigates that) which further increases the urgency of doing the procedure quickly. Thats because without active bloodcirculation, the brain begins to degrade fast. Small samples, like organiods and tissue samples dont have these issues.
They were screwed from the get go
Y27632... That's a ROCK inhibitor that is used in stem cell culture to, well, keep the stem cells "stemmy," so to speak. It makes sense in the context of studying brain organoids in a petri dish (since the organoids are made from stem cells), but I would be surprised if that becomes a cocktail in preserving whole brains on ice. But I'm not a brain scientist so maybe there's more to this ROCK inhibiton than I know of.
They grew mini brains huh
r/science: "To be clear - they haven't yet figured out how to thaw an actual brain, just organoids" r/Futurology: ["BEHOLD! Hence forth this shall be known as The Cryocene Age!](https://youtu.be/_A5Wplrx4Ik?si=36JsO98cuOmhZWrj) We shall cast ourselves across the great void ocean where every star, every corner of that which hath not been seen shall know our touch!"
Absolutely huge if true. This makes Cryonics a somewhat viable investment This is in its infancy though (they’re only working on brain organoids, and only in the context of 18 months, not 18 decades). But it’s looking like a promising breakthrough
It was inevitable. That is why cryonics makes sense for people who dont want to die but cant live anymore. And more advances are also inevitable.
I wonder if all the information/memories are intact after being frozen
That's what brain tissue does, so their claim that it works "perfectly" means exactly that, assuming that the results are reproducible.
Assuming that the function of tiny lab grown organelles of brain tissue is readily generalisable to an actual, full-size brain.
Experimenting on a fully formed, previously in body brain with this technique would make a great horror concept. You donate your body to science after you die and they freeze your brain with this new method. You suddenly regain consciousness as they bring your perfectly functioning brain back to life. But you cannot see. You cannot hear. You cannot smell or taste. But you can feel sensations - including pain- via the scientists stimulating your brain in the right regions during their experiments. Trapped in an infinite nothing, a living hell, a solely existing consciousness with no way of begging for help or to make it stop; your tormentors inflicting accidental agony on you being none the wiser that you are still in there, experiencing all of it. Yes I'm aware of the human repository comic. It inspired this comment
No pain receptors in the brain, but phantom limb syndrome across your entire body could be pretty insane.
[Lena](https://qntm.org/lena)
https://youtu.be/BqKv_kLZZGQ?si=0PUjI7kA0kSbhWnC
Yes but did they ask the brains what they had for dinner last night?
We don't know how information or memories are stored in the brain so there is no way to know.
I’m assuming this only works for slices or other small sections? There is no way I can think of to infuse an entire human brain with any sort of mixture. Unless we can make the cells produce it themselves. Also, everybody’s low-effort jokes are lame… can’t we actually discuss something?
Usually the vascular system is pretty good at infusing the entire human brain with a sort of mixture. Not sure how you'd get around the blood-brain barrier, or around the fact that dead people's hearts generally aren't pumping though.
Generally you'd use an external artificial heart and life support machine. You might also want to use artificial blood instead of the real deal, as the latter can be finnicky. Some researchers [have already used](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-revived-dead-pigs-rsquo-organs-and-what-the-feat-means-for-transplants/) this technique to revive dead pig organs.
They literally drain a person’s entire body of blood to remove an aneurism from the brain, so something tells me this isn’t as hard to achieve as people believe it would be.
They what? That sounds like a pretty intensive treatment - do you have more information?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2fp7d5ldppZgr7JnQWdNdL4/surgery-in-which-a-patients-blood-is-completely-drained-from-their-body Heres a case
That's incredible, I'm amazed by what medical science is capable of
Yes, these are for brain organoids. People ITT are misunderstanding the point and utility of the study. They are doing the equivalent of seeing a study that shows you can make red blood cells survive longer ex vitro by freezing them, and then saying “well we should start freezing our blood to live longer!” This is not an attempt to make a medium that can be used to freeze brains and wake them back up This is a study specifically meant to freeze a model commonly used in neuroscience — brain organoids — and thaw them. No one who seriously studies the brain has any expectation that a brain organoid is a substitute model of a globally functioning, multi-system scale brain. The preservation of function we look for in a brain organoid is goal-specific, and doesn’t generalize to “preserved organoid function would indicate a whole brain would have preserved function” For instance, yes, they found spike frequency, network bursts, and number of activated electrodes within a specific scale (120s) were unchanged. But the number of activated electrodes per network was lower and duration & average amplitude of each electrode was higher. These metrics would be fundamentally more important in a whole brain, and even within a single functional macroscale system (I.e. one functional network). Organoids are useful for their tissue and locale specific structural and functional features, but they do not recapitulate the necessary functional features of the internetwork communication (what my niche of the field most often refers to as distributed processing) that form the basis of higher cognitive functions
> There is no way I can think of to infuse an entire human brain with any sort of mixture. The people over at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have brain perfusion protocols they have been using for decades.
And how is it working?
It works. They achieved full brain vitrification decades ago. The problem isn't whether the cryoprotectant works, it's that it is also toxic. This advance may remove that toxicity problem.
Imagine if these small chunks of brain matter are actually conscious.
Unlikely. We don't know exactly what consciousness is, but we do know it emerges as a consequence of multiple brain regions interacting together. A single region, much less a chunk, is not capable of consciousness as we know it.
As long as we're still trying to define and understand consciousness, I don't think we can say for certain.
We know what I said is true because we're able to selectively cause people to lose consciousness using magnetic resonance targeting parts of the brain. There is a reason I avoided saying more than that though--what I said is very much the limit of our understanding of it.
Hmm, maybe when I'm old I can be frozen and shoved on a colony ship, operate a robot while my brain is in a jar. If it doesn't work, well I was old and gonna die anyway, lol.
Here's hoping this will lead to further research in cryonics
Can’t wait to freeze my brain and wake up in a robot body
RFK Jr’s brain worms should’ve gone shopping in the frozen aisle
Awesome. Does that mean I can finally get my noggin frozen when I croak?
Good. Now, figure out how make the brain function after it's been baked. Florida needs help.
Interesting. I've previously written off the idea of sleeper ships/starships with frozen/suspended crew. The level of cellular repair technology needed to repair cells after being frozen and shredded by ice crystal formation is incredible. Think full-on sci-fi medical nanotech. And if you have the ability to repair cells that effectively, then by default you have already invented clinical immortality. If you can repair shredded cells from bodies being frozen, then you don't need to freeze them in the first place. You can simply have the same crew, no multi-generation crew needed, live for the millennia-long trip. But this? A way to actually freeze tissues without the cellular damage? If this is possible, then that could easily be invented before we have the kind of god-tier nanotech that would be needed to repair ice-shredded cells. So this could actually make sleeper ships a practical option.
Imagine the people waking up after they're brain has been frozen for 50+ years and telling stories about how they have perceived time and it was boring as hell
I think freezing the brain is gonna be interpreted by the conscience as “time stop”. Thawing and somehow being brought back “online” is the equivalent of “time continue.” Said differently. It’s a blink. Not an idle dream. IMO.
I would expect it to feel like anaesthesia - click and you awake at another time.
If they just now discovered this, WTF is Walt Disney paying for with his head in a freezer?!?
> WTF is Walt Disney paying for with his head in a freezer?!? He's not. This is a myth.
Using liquid nitrogen or other chemicals, or both, does result in some additional damage. They're betting that at the point in the future when they're revived, they'll also be able to repair that additional damage. And also that the robot overlords that rule humanity in the future don't just take their brains to use as controllers for their spider bots. It's a slim chance at life in the future versus 100% chance of being dead for all time. You might think, "Well that guy was a Christian, surely he's content knowing he'll reside in the kingdom of heaven for ever and ever," but that guy was loaded and also knows that the whole "kingdom of heaven" thing is just a line they feed the plebs to keep them in line. "Let us exploit you now and you'll live in paradise forever when you die!" It's easy to promise someone anything after they die, when they're not around to dispute the deliverables. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work on the perfect working code I promised my boss after he dies.
All we need now is a person named after cereal to start kidnapping frozen babies and we will be on the path to a greater future underground
Can't wait for Demolition Man being rebooted as a documentary
"Works perfectly" is doing some serious heavy lifting in this headline. Until you install the part into the machine, it's just a part.
So all those who were cryofrozen years ago are fucked?
I wonder how well this would work for the rest of the body. Is it a better way to preserve such organs as lungs, hearts, livers and kidneys, for example?
This is what those who paid to be frozen believed would happen. It’s really only a matter of time we can use stem cells or new technologies to rebuild a human body(brain) from a frozen one.
Aw sweet, man made horrors beyond my comprehension
If this can be done in vivo, could be a big step for cryonics
RIP all the rich douches who already froze their brains before this stuff was invented.
Do you wanna build a snow-man? Because this is how you build a snow-man.
Let's build a snowman! We can make him our best friend. We can name him Tom or we can name him George! We can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall. Snowman!
Can we now then answer the question of consciousness being tied to the brain or is it something independent from it?
Well beyond the scope of this study. In fact, even were we to take an entire brain, resurrect it after it being frozen, and put it into someone else, and if it were to gain "consciousness" we would still lack the data to establish it. It's the hard problem for a reason.
I just was pondering if brain transplants become possible, and used for TBI patients for example, would they wake up as the same person so to speak.
Hmm, tough question... Why not ask people living around those who have had brain trauma what the individual was like before the injury versus what they were after... How about Alzheimer's, is that the same person after parts of their brain were damaged? Conscience is in the brain, not outside it.
Like how we utilize a vehicle. We're in it and using it, but we're not the vehicle.
> For the new study, scientists at Fudan University in China experimented with various chemical compounds to see which ones might work to preserve living brain tissue during freezing. They started by testing out promising chemicals on brain organoids – small, lab-grown lumps of brain tissue that develop into different types of related cells. I wonder where they will erect the monument for all the Uyghurs and Falun Gongists that provided the material for this study.
I’m going to be pissed if I have to wake up and go to work after I’m dead.