Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
Brain Preservation is based firmly in mainstream science.
There are many different types of evidence, and they are certainly not all equal. Most people don't understand how to categorize good versus bad evidence.
Anecdotal Evidence: This is evidence based on personal observation and is nearly worthless in most situations. Anyone can claim anything and they regularly do. Many people regularly fall for anecdotal claims even though they should know better and should not be so gullible. But what's really interesting is that many scientific papers are also anecdotal. For example, a case report might be published in a reputable journal observing that Covid cases are higher in a certain subpopulation in a single hospital. All case reports are anecdotal evidence. They are not intended to influence any decisions about patient care, but are instead intended to be used by other scientists to give them suggestions on actual research that they might perform to try to determine if this observation applies more broadly and what to do about it. Lay people should never quote a scientific article which is based on anecdotal evidence because they are not the intended audience. Nevertheless, this happens with great regularity. Many uninformed people are convinced that it must be true if it's published in a scientific journal, but that simply isn't the case. Opinion articles by scientists also frequently fall under this category.
Observational Studies: These studies draw inferences from populations. There is no control group, so the evidence is of fairly low quality.
Experimental Studies: These include randomized and non-randomized controlled trials and are of higher quality.
Secondary Reviews: These summarize other research and include systematic reviews, practice guidelines, and meta-analyses. These are the highest quality of evidence. Lay people can get some benefit from these if they are careful.
Tertiary Sources: Encyclopedias and textbooks summarize and quote secondary reviews as well as lower quality evidence. These are the most useful source of evidence for lay people as long as the writing is carefully vetted in the editorial process.
AI Sources: These can be helpful as a starting point for general understanding, but they can have confident-sounding errors. There is also no editorial review process or citations. Reputable institutions and textbooks will be more accurate.
Even if lay people only look at the high quality secondary reviews, they are not really qualified to properly interpret them. There can be a lot of complexity and nuance. It is for this reason that lay people should generally rely on experts in their field to interpret evidence for them. All the experts will usually agree, but sometimes there are outliers. It's very important to learn how to identify those outliers and ignore them. The main approach is to look at official statements produced by groups of experts and to defer more to "mainstream" sources or to tertiary sources. Let's take climate change as an example. There is strong consensus among scientists that human activity is the cause of global warming. Reviews have been written that indicate that over 99% of scientists agree, so there is no controversy. Other studies have called out the denialism as pseudoscience. So what's a lay person supposed to believe when an "expert" confidently claims that there is scientific controversy surrounding the cause of climate change? They need to decide whether the expert is truly an expert. They also need to determine whether the expert represents the mainstream consensus or whether they have their own agenda. If this person starts giving reasons why the mainstream is wrong, you now know that you can just ignore everything they say because the mainstream experts are already aware of that evidence and have properly considered it when arriving at their mainstream consensus.
On the topic of brain preservation, there are certain scientists who must be ignored. Specifically, this would apply to any scientist who supports cryopreservation without fixation as an acceptable protocol for current patients. The mainstream position on reversibility of brain cryopreservation is that it's so far in the future that there is no timeline, but instead only skepticism that it will even be possible at all. It is also well outside the mainstream scientific consensus to claim that cryopreservation without fixation is of adequate quality to preserve structure. Any scientist who suggests doing so is biased. Following the guidelines above for weighing evidence, it becomes clear that lay people must completely ignore any scientist who holds this position and must completely disregard all of their statements as inaccurate. Yes, many of their statements might be accurate and other scientists can easily filter those out. But it becomes impossible for any lay person to discern which statements are accurate and which are biased, so they are the wrong experts to ask about brain preservation. It's important to only listen to mainstream scientists, and to not take advice about brain preservation from biased outliers.
Alternative medicine is that which is not scientifically supported. Does that mean it should be avoided? Nearly always, yes. It's a waste of time and money and can have negative consequences. In spite of this, 36% of US adults use some form of alternative medicine, not even counting prayer. 88% of adults believe that "there are some good ways of treating sickness that medical science does not recognize". They are wrong. However, there are a few situations where alternative medicine is not as strongly discouraged. It's generally considered acceptable to use alternative medicine for chronic pain or in dying patients when it does not endanger the patient. In other words, when science has reached its limits, the main consideration becomes prevention of harm.
Brain preservation has two distinct phases: The first phase is structural preservation, and then sixty years later, the second phase is memory reconstruction. We will consider these two phases separately.
The science of structural brain preservation is well established. There is broad scientific consensus that preserving brain tissue with aldehyde preserves the structure. There is a lot of nuance about certain kinds of damage in certain situations, but fundamentally all scientists agree that the structure is getting preserved. Scientists will universally agree that preservation works. This technique is used widely by brain banks and neuroscientists every day in order to preserve brain structure and study it. Even if we still don't know exactly how the brain works, that doesn't matter too much because we just attempt to preserve everything.
The memory reconstruction and Whole Brain Emulation phase that will happen about sixty years later also has broad scientific consensus. Many scientists are pursuing exactly this goal of reconstructing memories based on tracing the pathways, otherwise known as the connectome. They are doing it at OpenWorm, Drosophila Connectomics Group, Human Connectome Projects, Blue Brain Project, MICrONS, and many other places. Clearly, there is mainstream scientific consensus that tracing the entire connectome is feasible some day, even if it's far in the future. One of the main limitations is computing power.
There is no scientific skepticism regarding our procedures, including the second phase of memory reconstruction and Whole Brain Emulation. However, mainstream scientists will push back if we call it revival or if we mention biological reconstruction because they lack imagination. They also frequently get our process confused with Suspended Animation or Traditional Cryonics. It's neither of those, but it's easy for scientists who are unfamiliar with the nuances to group or conflate them.