"What would happen if they transplanted your brain into another body?"

BarcelonaWhen the endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona (UB) Ramon Gomis had recently begun his career as a doctor, he helped a female doctor attend to a woman who had suddenly stopped breathing. Her heart was not beating, and Gomis began to give her cardiac massage until the patient regained her pulse. It was the first time he had performed this maneuver. "Physically it's tiring, but emotion carries you," he said about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). After the woman regained her pulse, the doctor was left with a doubt: "What will happen to that person? What happened to her brain?". That same afternoon he visited her. The woman was fine and could speak, contrary to what he had feared, although she did not remember the doctor's face at all. In fact, the woman lived for several more years. "For her loved ones it was a miracle, but only because the concept of death was that she wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating. Today we know that's not the case."

Gomis intervened this Tuesday afternoon in the debate Is there life after death?,from the IEC Cycle organized by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and ARA, in which physicist David Jou also participated. Gomis continued explaining that when a person suffers cardiac arrest or stops breathing, "there is still brain activity" at that moment. "There is an experience that is defined as near-death, we can explain it scientifically in many ways, but it is worth it being the subject of debate," added Gomis during the session, moderated by the deputy director of ARA Carla Turró.

However, narrowing down the answer to "what is dying?", Gomis explained that when assessing whether a person who has died can be an organ donor, medicine looks at whether there is no longer any brain, respiratory, or cardiac activity. "Flat EEG. That person could be a donor," he explained. Regarding the possibility of extending life even after death, the doctor referred to scientific advances: "If, while in cardiac and cerebral arrest, we take some cells, cultivate them, and after some time we can transplant them... Where is the barrier?".

Putting the brain in a computer

Regarding the question of whether there is life after death, David Jou, a retired professor of condensed matter physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), said he sees possibilities that there might be and that this could be compatible "with the principles of known science." The scientist also hypothesized: "What if your heart is about to die but your brain isn't, and that brain were transplanted to another body? Would that be another life?"

Jou also hypothesized that all the information from a brain could be installed in a computer, and referred to consciousness. For example, he said that even if the brain were installed in a computer, it would continue to know the body it belongs to: "You know it because you have seen it, you have touched it, and you know all this through the brain. So if you had all the information from the brain, you would have all the information about the body, even if you were alive." Continuing his hypothetical line of reasoning, the physicist wondered how one could then interact with "other computer souls." And he said they could love and fall in love, for example: "You have all the information in the brain, and therefore you have love, and also hate."