x-posted on X

312 neuroscientists were surveyed, and they assigned substantial probability to long-term memories only depending on static brain structure preservable by modern brain preservation techniques.

Modern brain preservation techniques have a substantial probability to be good enough to preserve identity—to be a blueprint for a future whole-brain emulation/reconstruction/repair.

It's hard to overstate how important of an update this should be for a lot of people—seems like the highest impact per bit of information you could give an individual, at least one who wasn't signed up for brain preservation because they thought it was extremely unlikely to work.

In terms of preservation quality, there's still the uncertainty of whether you'll die in a way that's amenable to a good preservation—but that probability doesn't seem so low as to be worth ignoring the potentiality of brain preservation.

Here are some specific key take-aways from the survey:

1. 70.5% agreed that long-term memories are primarily maintained by neuronal connectivity patterns and synaptic strengths (not unlike AIs!)
2. there were no clear consensus on which specific neurophysiological features or scales are critical for memory storage
3. ~40% median probability that whole brain emulation could theoretically be created from a preserved brain (ie. a static snapshot)
4. neither research background nor expertise level significantly influenced views on whether memories could be extracted from brain structure alone

Also see:

• Andy's summary (includes an interesting analogy with the AI field evolved)
• Ariel's summary on X (more technical, and with graphs)
• Full article