Whenever I give a public talk - after I’ve finished explaining how neuroscientists can now selectively manipulate or erase a mouse’s memories, or how patients sometimes have their heart and brain activity entirely stopped during surgery by cooling them below 20°C - and I’ve finished making the case for preserving the brains of dying people so as to give them a chance of future revival, I’m inevitably asked the following question during Q&A:

“OK, but what do your colleagues think?”

It’s a good question.

When I say ‘brain preservation may be able to stop people from dying’, I’m making a weird, bold claim. Weird, bold claims are mostly wrong. Still, if the claim is being espoused by a community of relevant experts - rather than just a few enthusiastic advocates - it’s much more likely to be worth taking seriously.

Of course, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to cite expert opinion at all; I’d just be able to show you unambiguous evidence of the procedure working, from preservation through to revival. I dream of the day when the first revived laboratory mouse - revived from cryogenic temperatures, or uploaded into a robotic murine body - runs through a maze just as it did before it was preserved. (Perhaps perversely, I would even appreciate some definitive proof that preservation cannot work - at least then we’d know this avenue was closed, and could turn our efforts elsewhere.)

But preservation is a two-part technology. The preservation half happens now; the revival half happens (maybe) in the future. We can’t run the full experiment just yet. For now, we’re stuck doing what we do for any consequential question where we can’t just wait and see (as with climate change projections or assessing the trajectory of AI development): we gather the best available evidence, and we ask the people most qualified to interpret it.

So, to return to my perennial audience question then, what do my scientific and medical colleagues think of the prospects of preservation?

Last year, Andrew McKenzie, Emil Kendziorra, and I surveyed 312 neuroscientists about the neurophysiological foundations of memory and whether preservation could enable indefinite memory retention. We found the typical respondent believed there’s a 40% probability that a well-preserved brain retains its long-term memories and could eventually be uploaded1 (publication, blog post, news article).

This year, we turned...

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