To sidestep death, preserve your connectome, with Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

In David's life so far, he has read literally hundreds of books about the future. Yet none has had such a provocative title as this: “The future loves you: How and why we should abolish death”. That’s the title of the book written by the guest in this episode, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a neuroscientist, and a Research Fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.

One of the key ideas in Ariel’s book is that so long as your connectome – the full set of the synapses in your brain – continues to exist, then you continue to exist. Ariel also claims that brain preservation – the preservation of the connectome, long after we have stopped breathing – is already affordable enough to be provided to essentially everyone. These claims raise all kinds of questions, which are addressed in this conversation.

Selected follow-ups:

• Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston - personal website
• Book webpage - includes details of when Ariel is speaking in the UK and elsewhere
• Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest - Wikipedia
• Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness - article by Karl Friston that mentions bacteria
• List of advisors to Conscium
• Does the UK use £15,000, £30,000 or a £70,000 per QALY cost effectiveness threshold? by Jason Shafrin
• Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? - US Berkeley News
• What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory - Preprint by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Emil Kendziora, and Andrew McKenzie

Related previous episodes:

• Ep 91: The low-cost future of preserving brains, with Jordan Sparks
• Ep 77: The case for brain preservation, with Kenneth Hayworth

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration