Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind
Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind
摘要: Biotechnology and health
Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind
The quest for cognitive immortality continues.
Antonio Regalado
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正文
Biotechnology and health
Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind
The quest for cognitive immortality continues.
Antonio Regalado
archive page
October 15, 2026
Eddie Guy
Have you ever thought about what makes you
? Science assures us it has everything to do with the three-pound organ between our ears, with its billions of neurons and trillions of delicate connections. But it’s a lot trickier to explain why we have a sense of self-awareness or to pin down precisely where that first memory of Mommy actually resides. As we age, we forget most of what we’ve experienced, yet there’s still undeniable continuity: At 30, or 50, or 70, you will still be you.
To preserve that elusive continuity of self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going—even beyond death. Let’s call them the “mind savers.” They’re exploring everything from freezing brains in liquid nitrogen to augmenting living ones to uploading our memories to the cloud. Here, we look at six possible paths for keeping your mind going, how feasible they’d be, and what benefits the present-day research might bring—even if cognitive immortality doesn’t pan out.
EDDIE GUY
Head transplant
An entirely new body
Key Tech Required
Spinal-cord fusion
Mired in technical and ethical issues
n 1970, the neurosurgeon Robert White removed the head of a rhesus monkey and transplanted it onto the body of another. The patched-together primate lived several hours before succumbing to its injuries. White, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, tried the surgery several times. Remarkably, the reattached heads could move their eyes and mouths, but because he’d severed the monkeys’ spinal cords, those heads never gained control of their new bodies.
White’s experiments have been a source of grim fascination ever since. But to a few neuroscientists they’re inspiration, suggesting that one day a human head transplant—or, as some call it, a body transplant—