[Cryonics] This is so incredibly interesting.

ucfgrad93 said:

Hopefully, they can get the revival part worked out.

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TechGod said:

The do seem to say that once the damage is repaired only then will the revive the person.

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Expected to be sorted out by 2040.

That aside, imagine the social problems. Waking up in a new day and age with more advanced tech etc..

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decafjava said:

Yea like time travel - jumping forward (only way we can).

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TechGod said:

Expected to be sorted out by 2040.

That aside, imagine the social problems. Waking up in a new day and age with more advanced tech etc..

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ucfgrad93 said:

Hopefully, they can get the revival part worked out.

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APlotdevice said:

I doubt we could revive any currently frozen body. The problem is when you freeze water, it tends to form very sharp crystalline structures that puncture cell membranes. The trick to making cryonics viable is to find a way to prevent such crystallization.

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SandboxGeneral said:

Not only that, but how do we reawaken, for a lack of a better term, our consciousness, our being, the thing that makes us, well, us?

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APlotdevice said:

Well the whole basis of cryonics is that everything that makes us what we are is simply the arrangement of our neurons.

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While performing deep brain surgery on a woman with epilepsy, neuroscientists from George Washington University stimulated an area of her brain that unexpectedly — and temporarily — caused her to lose awareness. It's a discovery that could shed light on the very nature of consciousness itself.

"We describe a region in the human brain where electrical stimulation reproducibly disrupted consciousness," write the scientists in their study. It's an important finding as the "neural mechanisms that underlie consciousness are not fully understood." No doubt, consciousness is still a profound mystery, so much so that we don't know how it arises — or how it switches off

Mohamad Koubeissi and his team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to figure out where the woman's seizures were coming from. They placed one electrode near a part of the deep brain called the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

The claustrum is a thin and weirdly shaped sheet of neurons that's attached to the underside of the neocortex right smack-dab in the center of the brain. Though the precise role of the claustrum is not known, it's suspected to play a role in communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, specifically those regions that control attention. It works like a conductor in an orchestra, coordinating the cerebral cortex. But instead of synchronizing musicians, it synchronizes the timescale between various brain parts, resulting in the seamless quality of conscious experience.

Helen Thomson from New Scientist reports:

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments.

To confirm that they were affecting the woman's consciousness rather than just her ability to speak or move, the team asked her to repeat the word "house" or snap her fingers before the stimulation began. If the stimulation was disrupting a brain region responsible for movement or language she would have stopped moving or talking almost immediately. Instead, she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. Since there was no sign of epileptic brain activity during or after the stimulation, the team is sure that it wasn't a side effect of a seizure.

Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. "I would liken it to a car," he says. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key."

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TechGod said:

This is extremely interesting. So in a way could this be used to "shut off" the mind then when whatever is needed to be done then reawaken the person?

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TechGod said:

Its scary people have volunteered to freeze themselves with possibly no hope if revival.

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TechGod said:

Its scary people have volunteered to freeze themselves with possibly no hope if revival.

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TechGod said:

While I understand that, the massive culture shock after being awoken could be huge. .

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TechGod said:

While I understand that, the massive culture shock after being awoken could be huge.

If you have read "Brave New World" then you surely know that the vastly different society drives John the Savage to suicide, I think we might actually see that in these patients as well. Really, imagine waking up after 100 years? I would rather kill myself than learn that my family is dead and I was awakened for nothing.

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