# Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind > Technologists are exploring brain freezing, digital avatars, head transplants and more to achieve cognitive immortality. Most remain decades away. - Title: Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind | Shortify - Summary: Technologists are exploring brain freezing, digital avatars, head transplants and more to achieve cognitive immortality. Most remain decades away. Six… - Keywords: cognitive immortality, brain preservation, head transplant, sergio canavero, mindclones, martine rothblatt, brain upload, connectome, sebastian seung, synthetic neocortex, ray kurzweil, arpa-h - Source: MIT Technology Review — https://technologyreview.com/2026/10/15/1145819/six-wild-ideas-perpetuating-your-mind-cognitive-immortality - Read time: 4 min - Topics: cognitive immortality, brain preservation, head transplant, sergio canavero, mindclones, martine rothblatt, brain upload, connectome, sebastian seung, synthetic neocortex, ray kurzweil, arpa-h ## What makes you you Science says your identity lives in your brain's three pounds of neurons and trillions of connections. But where exactly your sense of self resides remains a mystery. ## The mind savers emerge Technologists are exploring ways to preserve consciousness beyond death, from freezing brains in liquid nitrogen to uploading memories to the cloud. They call themselves mind savers. ## Head transplant: the idea In nineteen seventy, neurosurgeon Robert White at Case Western Reserve University transplanted a rhesus monkey's head onto another monkey's body. The primate lived several hours. ## Head transplant: the obstacle White's reattached monkey heads could move their eyes and mouths but never controlled their new bodies because their spinal cords were severed. That remains the central problem. ## Canavero's bold claim Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero claims reconnecting severed spinal cords is already possible. Ten years ago he found a volunteer, computer programmer Valery Spiridinov, who later withdrew. ## Canavero's pig experiment Canavero's team cut through spinal cords of three pigs midway along their backs, then fused the severed nerve bodies using surgical sealant. All three regained the ability to stand and walk unsteadily. ## Mainstream skepticism Grégoire Courtine, a spinal rehabilitation specialist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, says he follows Canavero's claims with little respect and thinks we should pay zero attention. > There is no technology … capable of such a crazy idea. ## Mindclones: the concept Futurist Martine Rothblatt proposed uploading diaries, recordings and social media into digital avatars called mindclones. She argued they would eventually be considered conscious and afforded human rights. ## Mindclones: the reality Services like StoryFile, Afterlife AI and Synthesia now let users create conversational bots and video talking heads from personal data. Influencers use AI clones on TikTok and people preserve aging parents' personalities. ## Rothblatt's avatar moment At a twenty twenty-five UCLA event called The Bridge to Humanizing AI, Rothblatt appeared as a digital avatar named Marvatar. Attendees were visibly moved and wept with wonder at her vision. > The dance isn't about who leads, but how we move together. ## The consciousness problem Mindclones lack evidence of true self-awareness. Neuroscientists have no clear definition of consciousness or diagnostic test to apply to avatars. The final determination might rest with the beholder. ## Brains in vats: the pitch Company Bexorg acquires human brains from organ donors and keeps them alive in vats by infusing them with oxygen-rich artificial blood. The company says they are useful for drug testing. ## Brains in vats: the limits Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja says the brains are metabolically active but have lost all coordinated electrical activity, so they are not conscious. Currently they survive only about twenty-four hours. ## Gradual brain replacement funded In twenty twenty-six, ARPA-H committed up to one hundred seventy-five million dollars to FRONT, a program to manufacture tissue for grafting into stroke victims' brains. The official goal is reversing damage. ## The hidden agenda Jean Hébert, leading FRONT, argued in his twenty twenty book Replacing Aging that we can live longer by replacing aging brain cells with young ones. The process would happen gradually to preserve identity. ## Brain upload: the theory Princeton neuroscientist Sebastian Seung's hypothesis states you are your connectome, the brain's network of hundreds of trillions of synapses where memory and identity reside. Scientists are already mapping simpler brains. > You are your connectome. ## Brain upload: the timeline A twenty twenty-five survey of three hundred twelve neuroscientists in PLOS One estimated human whole-brain emulation would not happen before twenty one twenty-five. That is over a century away. ## Brain preservation companies Nectome and Sparks Brain Preservation offer to preserve brains today using chemicals that fix fruit fly brains for connectome mapping. ## Synthetic neocortex: the vision Ray Kurzweil predicts advanced nanobots will wire brain cells to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud, creating an extra brain. ## The hardware brain future Daniel Burger, founder of stealth startup Eightsix Science, believes gradual brain replacement into a hardware brain could migrate your mind without breaking continuity of self. > From that point on, stuff becomes really crazy. ## Key takeaway Six experimental approaches to preserving human consciousness range from head transplants to brain uploading, but most face severe technical and ethical obstacles.