Can We Extract Memories from Dead People?

When someone dies, their brain dies too. All their memories seem to disappear forever. But what if they don’t? Scientists just asked a big question: can we pull memories out of a dead brain?

Scientists asked 312 brain experts a wild question: can you pull memories out of a dead person’s brain and put them in a computer? The answers might change how we think about death.

When someone dies, their brain dies too. All their memories seem to disappear forever. But what if they don’t? Scientists just asked a big question: can we pull memories out of a dead brain?

The Big Question

Dr. Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston from Australia led a team that asked 312 brain scientists something wild. Could we take memories from a dead person’s brain? The team split the scientists into two groups. One group studies how memories work. The other group studies brains in general.

The scientists weren’t talking about technology we have today. They wanted to know if memories are physical things. If they are, maybe we could save them when someone dies.

This isn’t just science fiction anymore. It touches on big questions about what happens when we die and what makes us who we are.

How Memories Actually Work

Most brain scientists – about 70% – think memories are stored like physical things in the brain. They’re not just electricity that disappears when you die. They’re more like permanent changes to how brain cells connect to each other.

Think of it like a dirt path. The more people walk on it, the more permanent it becomes. Memories work similarly. The more you remember something, the stronger the physical connections become in your brain.

Scientists know this because of medical cases. Some people have surgery where their brain activity stops completely. When they wake up, they still remember things from before the surgery. This proves memories aren’t just ongoing brain activity. They’re built into the brain’s structure.

Freezing Brains the Right Way

Normal freezing destroys brain tissue. Ice crystals form and punch holes through everything. It’s like freezing a strawberry – it turns to mush when you thaw it.

But there’s a special way to freeze brains called ASC. It uses chemicals and super-fast cooling. Instead of ice crystals, it turns the brain into something like glass. This keeps all the tiny structures intact.

Scientists were asked: could you pull memories from a brain frozen this way? The average answer was 40% chance. But opinions split wildly. Some said 10% chance. Others said 75% chance. Brain scientists can’t agree on this.

Copying Entire Brains

The survey went even further. What about copying an entire brain digitally? Not just memories, but everything – personality, consciousness, the whole person.

Again, scientists said 40% chance this could work. If they could record brain activity before the person died, the chances went up to 62%.

This isn’t pure fantasy. Scientists recently made a digital copy of part of a fruit fly’s brain. The digital version acted like a real fly in some ways. It showed that frozen brain structure contains real information about behavior.

When Could This Happen?

The brain scientists made predictions about timing:

Tiny worms: around 2045
Mice: around 2065
Humans: around 2125

These dates reflect how much more complex human brains are. A tiny worm has 302 brain cells. Humans have 86 billion. That’s a huge difference.

Younger scientists were more optimistic. But being an expert in memory research didn’t change people’s answers much. This suggests the beliefs come from general scientific knowledge, not special expertise.

The Big Mystery

Scientists agree you probably don’t need to measure every atom in the brain. But they can’t agree on how detailed you’d need to get.

Most think you’d need to see structures 500 times smaller than a hair’s width. But below that level? Nobody knows which details actually matter for memories.

This shows how much we still don’t understand about memory. Scientists can make memories fire by shining lights on brain cells. But they don’t know exactly how memories are stored. It could be tiny details of individual connections. Or it could be bigger patterns. Or both.

Memory Experts Are More Doubtful

Strangely, memory experts were less optimistic than other brain scientists. Memory researchers said 30% chance. Other scientists said 50% chance.

Why? Memory experts know how messy and complicated memory really is. The brain doesn’t store memories like files on a computer. Memories are scattered across different brain areas. They depend on complex interactions that might be impossible to capture in frozen tissue.

The $100,000 Challenge

Someone is offering $100,000 to the first team that can read a real memory from a preserved brain. This challenge could prove whether the idea actually works.

The survey had some problems. Only about 12% of the scientists they contacted actually answered. This might skew the results. The survey also treated all memories the same. But different types of memories might work differently.

The survey also assumed perfect freezing conditions. In real life, brains start breaking down the moment someone dies. Most freezing methods cause some damage.

What This Means for Everyone

If this technology becomes real, it changes everything. Death might not be final anymore. People could live forever as digital copies of themselves.

But this raises huge questions. Would a digital copy really be you? Or just a copy that thinks it’s you? Who gets to decide what happens to your digital self? Could someone steal your memories?

The scientists only looked at whether this might be technically possible. They didn’t tackle these bigger questions. But if many scientists think memory extraction could happen in the next 100 years, we need to start thinking about these issues now.

Zeleznikow-Johnston pointed out that 40% isn’t certainty. But it’s not tiny either. A lot of brain scientists think there’s a real chance this will work. He thinks that number will probably grow as technology gets better.

This study was the first time scientists formally asked their colleagues whether death is really final. The results suggest maybe it isn’t. The memories that make us who we are might survive in ways we’re just starting to understand.

SOURCES: IFL Science, Gizmodo, PLOS One

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.