If a preserved brain holds the information that makes us who we are, can we prove it — by recovering a real memory from a static connectome?
The Brain Preservation Prize answered one question: can an entire brain be preserved so that its connectome remains structurally intact and traceable? The answer, verified in 2018, is yes. The natural next question is harder and more profound: does that preserved structure actually contain the information — the memories and identity — that we hope it does?
Demonstrating the viability of future revival has to start somewhere concrete. The first step is to show that any meaningful information can be recovered from a preserved brain at all — that a non-trivial memory can be decoded from a static connectome, without the living electrical activity of the brain. This is the goal of Aspirational Neuroscience.
This work is pursued through our affiliated community at AspirationalNeuroscience.org, which engages the neuroscience community on the open question of how memory and identity are physically stored — and how they might be read back. Simple memories have already been recovered from preserved animal nervous systems in published work; recovering a non-trivial memory has not yet been achieved, and that is the bar this prize is built around.
