| MadSci Network: Neuroscience |
Hi Chris,
I think the word you are looking for is "simultaneous" brain transference. I am a big fan of science fiction and I sense that you are too. Science fiction can certainly open our minds and let us explore possibilities that have not yet been realised. And you are quite right to say that things once thought not possible are now commonplace.
I started my answer a few words about science fiction because that describes the experiment that you outlined - it is science fiction, not science. Your experiment requires apparatus that cannot be designed and it makes assumptions about the workings of the brain and the nature of the mind which are incorrect. Let's look at what you propose.
"any kind of wiring that leads to or connects to his or her entire brain"The brain does not consist of wires, like a bundle of copper fibres. It consists of specialised cells called neurons. Leading in and out of the brain are nerves, which are more like fibres, also composed of cells. There are billions of neurons making up the brain and billions of connections between them. There is no way that you could "connect wires to the entire brain".
"should switch both person's minds or brain waves into the other persons body, thus, they switch bodies"There are an awful lot of assumptions in this sentence. First, you assume that the mind of an individual is defined by the sum of the electrical activity in their brain. Second, you assume that this activity appears as something mysterious called brain waves. Third, you assume that these brain waves can be captured and if the same set of waves could be generated in a second brain, then the owner of that brain would effectively become the same person as a person with those waves.
We are a long way from understanding exactly how the brain works and how we each acquire our own individual minds. But it most certainly does not occur in any of the ways described above! An individual is not defined by a unique brain electrical activity. If anything, they are defined by the ways in which genes are expressed in their brain cells and how the products of those genes interact with one another. We do talk of brain waves when we describe electrical activity in a brain, but that is all we are talking about - measured patterns of electrical activity, many of which are common to all brains. We certainly cannot capture all of that activity and reconstruct it elsewhere and even if we could, it's highly unlikely that we would reconstruct an individual's mind from that data.
By all means keep an open mind and be aware of extreme possibilities. But remember, as the great scientist Carl Sagan once said, your mind should not be so open that your brains fall out. Who knows - perhaps in the distant future, we will be able to transfer minds between bodies. But first, as with all science, we have to define our terms very precisely, then devise many experiments to answer questions using those terms and then work endlessly to acquire as complete an understanding of our system as we can. That's the difference between science and science fiction.
Neil
Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Neuroscience.