A cool fact about the human brain is that the left and right hemispheres function as their own little worlds, each with their own things to worry about, but if you remove one half of someone’s brain, they can sometimes not only survive, but their remaining brain half can learn to do many of the other half’s previous jobs, allowing the person to live a normal life. That’s right—you could lose half of your brain and potentially function normally.
So say you have an identical twin sibling named Bob who developes a fatal brain defect. You decide to save him by giving him half of your brain. Doctors operate on both of you, discarding his brain and replacing it with half of yours. When you wake up, you feel normal and like yourself. Your twin (who already has your identical DNA because you’re twins) wakes up with your exact personality and memories.
They are mostly talking about the cortex, the outer wrinkled layer. Functionally, however, the cortex is completely useless without a whole suite of subcortical structures and actually only has something like 20% of your neurons. Its a part of the whole functional network, not the whole thing, though in mammals it expanded quite a bit and took on a lot of specialization. I dont know if theres such a thing as a ‘generic’ thalamus network vs ‘your’ thalamus network, sounds like a question for the connectomics researchers to get on.
A lot of these things A—lie near or on the midline and have much less lateralization and more crosstalk, B—are absolutely vital if you say dont want parkinsonism or to fall into permanent slow wave sleep. Hemispherectomies generally go after the cortex and white matter sometimes taking some of the superficial subcortical stuff, in chunks. The results of such things are usually much more positive in young people of course.
However, since you dont lose autobiographical memories from careful excision of brain parts it does indeed suggest that they’re present and distributed throughout...
Let’s assume that the information that makes you you is contained within a half cortext. What do you think the chances are that they’d be able to “figure the rest out”? Ie. integrate the half cortex with other parts (maybe biological, maybe mechanical).
What are the implications of this with Cryonics? What about cryonically freezing half of your brain?
They are mostly talking about the cortex, the outer wrinkled layer. Functionally, however, the cortex is completely useless without a whole suite of subcortical structures and actually only has something like 20% of your neurons. Its a part of the whole functional network, not the whole thing, though in mammals it expanded quite a bit and took on a lot of specialization. I dont know if theres such a thing as a ‘generic’ thalamus network vs ‘your’ thalamus network, sounds like a question for the connectomics researchers to get on.
A lot of these things A—lie near or on the midline and have much less lateralization and more crosstalk, B—are absolutely vital if you say dont want parkinsonism or to fall into permanent slow wave sleep. Hemispherectomies generally go after the cortex and white matter sometimes taking some of the superficial subcortical stuff, in chunks. The results of such things are usually much more positive in young people of course.
However, since you dont lose autobiographical memories from careful excision of brain parts it does indeed suggest that they’re present and distributed throughout...
Let’s assume that the information that makes you you is contained within a half cortext. What do you think the chances are that they’d be able to “figure the rest out”? Ie. integrate the half cortex with other parts (maybe biological, maybe mechanical).