Resurrecting Consciousness

One of the great misrepresentations conveyed in television and film is the portrayal of death. It is not uncommon for a viewer to witness a skilled medical team routinely resuscitate someone from the precipice of oblivion. In a study from 2015 from the journal Resuscitation, researchers observed a CPR success rate of nearly 70% on two major medical dramas. The rate in real life, however, is about half as good.

Why does this matter? Because how death is portrayed on our screens in some immeasurable way prepares us for how it occurs in reality. If the culture is telling people that the odds of surviving a myocardial infarction, a pulmonary embolism, or a massive stroke is very high, then those people when patients (but more commonly, as family members of patients) are besotted with unreasonable expectations when the catastrophic event finally arrives. Odd, then, that these medical dramas strive for such a high degree of fidelity, yet fail to faithfully portray the most challenging moment of our lives.

Another interesting aspect of the Resuscitation study is how much focus the authors place on merely surviving death. That is, the article seems to concern itself with a binary outcome: did the patient die, or did they not die? What is much more salient to me as a physician once the patient has been revived is the question that should follow: how’s the brain doing? How much back-patting can practitioners do when the body has survived, but the mind has not?

When the heart stops, blood flow ceases everywhere and the brain is starved of oxygen and nutrients. In the best case scenario, resuscitation is administered quickly and appropriately such that when the heart is revived, the patient returns back to their usual mental capacity. The garden hose keeps watering the plants.

But this is often not the case. It is not uncommon for a CPR survivor to lose a significant amount of brain function and to be left permanently disabled as a result. This cognitive decline starts a chain reaction of sorts: tracheostomy tubes, permanent ventilatory support, permanent feeding tubes, and around the clock need for assistance with daily life activities.

Medicine hasn’t yet found a fix to the problem of getting the body back but not the brain. But a new study in Nature suggests the first clues to overcoming the problem of neuronal death. The researchers studied the brains of pigs slaughtered for meat. The isolated brains were pumped full of a proprietary solution called BrainEx filled with nutrients to feed brain cells and chemicals to prevent them from firing. After six hours, the disembodied brain cells behaved like animate neurons should, uptaking glucose, producing CO2. The brain cells were still alive, preserved by a simulacrum of nourishing blood.

The immediate medical implications are that further experiments, ultimately in intact humans who have suffered some degree of damage to their brain cells as from insufficient oxygen during cardiac arrest, may demonstrate that we may preserve greater cognitive function by administering some sort of restorative elixir intravenously. Survivors of cardiac arrests, strokes, or other causes of acute loss of oxygen and nutrients to the central nervous system may have a better chance of leaving the hospital with their minds intact.

But what does this technology mean for life extension? It’s one thing to preserve brain cells, but how about the entire network, the galaxy of neurons that constitute consciousness? Say your spouse is diagnosed with a terminal disease and you want to preserve his consciousness beyond the demise of his physical form. You want his brain to survive past his body. Cryopreservation of the brain might one day allow our loved ones to perpetually be in our lives.

This idea is just an idea right now, but perhaps this pig experiment is a germinal seed on a path toward actualization of an infinite consciousness. What will it mean when death becomes optional, when there arises an alternative to the one guarantee of lived existence, when the period becomes an ellipses?

The promise of this technology of extending the life of material brains prods us to consider an eternal mind, a disembodied consciousness that still has memories and fears and desires and worries. But no opposing thumbs. Not yet at least. Not until we can find a walking, talking house for that ever-lasting mind to reside in, a mechanical avatar that can perform the physical tasks of living when we’ve dematerialized our own.