Do you believe one day we will be able to transplant brains from one person’s old ‘wise’ body to a young body, so a

Question: Do you believe one day we will be able to transplant brains from one person's old 'wise' body to a young body, so a child would know all the things the other one knows, or you could take the brain from someone young who has just died before the brain dies and give it to someone with a non-working brain?
- Keywords:
  body,
  brains,
  transplant
Asked by King Julian to David, Gemma, Juhi, Matt, Stéphane, Yinka on 5 Mar 2018.
- Stéphane Berneau answered on 5 Mar 2018:
  
  That’s a very fascinating question. Have you ever heard about the first head transplant in human?
  Please find the link here: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/human-head-transplant/. Head and spine combine for transplantation because the brain on its own leads to an absence of connection with the motor organs and therefore, there will be no survival possible.
  
  I would prefer to think that not being wise during child is part of a learning process for a successfull development, therefore, I wouldn’t encourage it for being wiser.
  
  I would suggest that you are you because of your brain development in your own body and therefore, if you transfer your brain onto another body, this would be you and not fixing someone else.
  
  But It’s just my own philosophical explanation about life and own perception.
- Gemma Chandratillake answered on 5 Mar 2018:
  
  What a great question!
  If this were technically possible, which it probably will be for head transplants as Stephane mentions at some point in the nearish future, I would think of it more as a “body transplant” than a “brain transplant”. I think that will be how this sort of thing is used e.g. if one person is brain-dead, their body could be transplanted to another person who is very physically disabled, in order to give them a better quality of life – a very extreme form of organ donation. The brain is an organ that ages too, so in this case the person who received the “body transplant” could have a younger body but their brain would still be its original age so it could still get brain disorders that come with age e.g. Alzheimers disease. Knowing things through aging comes along with the bad stuff of aging for the brain unfortunately. There are quite a few old, rich people (particularly in America) that are interested in trying to live longer or forever though, so would be looking to make their bodies younger in any way they can…that’s where the ethics of this would come in – if this were possible, who should get a full-body transplant?
  This answer is based on the idea (I’d like to say *fact* but I’m not sure I have the evidence!) that *who* we are is based in our brains.
- Matt Bawn answered on 5 Mar 2018:
  
  I used to have a similar discussion with my house mate years ago. He would start off asking that given a perfect MRI image of a brain could you record thoughts? I answered that while this could characterise the “physical” nature of a brain what about the electrical impulses between neurons etc. My point is what is it that you want to transfer the biological entity that is the brain, individual memories of a person or the persons origional consciousness. It may be for example that an individual brains interaction with the rest of its body may effect it. A current trend for research in my area is the gut-brain axis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/.
  There is so much we don’t know about the brain or even what consciousness is that this becomes very philisophical. But its something that people realise we need to research Obama wanted to do this: https://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/, and maybe if the project stillgoes on it will lead to some of the answers.
  
  So if your asking if a brain could be transplanted then probably yes, but coherent thoughts I’m not so sure.
  
  P.S. If you are interested in brains consider the octopus: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/
- David Howard answered on 6 Mar 2018:
  
  Great question. I think it will be possible to conduct brain transplants in living people in the future. However, the issues pointed out by Gemma, with regards to older brains being more likely to develop degenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s disease, present an ethical dilemma. The desire to live for ever could also be problematic as to sustain the ongoing existence of life there is a need for evolution. Therefore there needs to be new life and death to ensure that new genetic mutations arise allowing adaption to changing environments.