[MURG] Not off [dead] during sleep

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 05:23:50PM -0700, James Swayze wrote:

> This is purely a layman's view of this but to me it makes incorrect the 
> idea that we are turned off or as good as dead and a new identical upon 
> waking that has bolstered ideas that copies are the same as originals. 
> We apparently are not entirely turned off during sleep. Somehow I 'feel' 
> this impinges on those arguments.

Again, flat EEG lacunes are common, occuring e.g. after 20-30 sec of stopped
blood flow (seen some), deep hyperthermia and anaesthesia (you can shut down hemispheres
selectively with that). Activity patterns are also scrambled during
knockouts, or seizures.

This is routinely experiences both by people and animals, with no detectable
side effects (minus minimal brain trauma artifacts).

The activity attractors are robustly regenerated every time. The information
present in temporarily shutdown or perturbed tissue is fully sufficient to
regenerate the original. Only very few people would claim all those folks in
the streets were zombies.

Of course, this doesn't exclude the possibility that even well cryopreserved
brains are denaturated enough to destroy that magic. The only way to find out
is through research.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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