Are they still “imprinted”?
In: Biology
The brain will start to decay pretty quickly, and the information will degrade until it’s lost.
Right now, even if the brain was preserved, we don’t have the tech (nor the knowledge needed to build the tech) to retrieve anything.
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The brain is biochemical. That means it uses living cells and chemicals to function.
After death the production of the required chemicals to continue functioning ceases. This results in the decay of every part of the brain.
We currently dont know how to retrieve”or view memories in the brain. However, we do know that memories are not contained in a single cell, but rather a pathway of cells. This implies, and has been shown, that damage to those areas prevents the memories from being retrieved. In other words, damage to the brain (decay or otherwise) prevents memories from being accessed.
Memories, to the best of our knowledge, do not exist independent of the brain, or in isolated parts of the brain. Instead, memories are part of the “fabric” of the brain. Once that fabric is damaged we do not know a way to repair it.
The brain is a lot more like RAM in a computer than it is, say a Hard Drive. Meaning if the power is shut off, the information stored there is lost fairly quickly, hence why it’s important to try and revive non-responsive people as quickly as possible, and why people who are medically dead and then revived often have some symptoms of amnesia.
In more depth, we don’t really understand yet how the brain’s memory really functions. Further complicating things is that no two brains are wired quite the same so even if you expose two individuals to the same experiences their entire lives, small differences in genetics mean their brains will work very differently. This means that even if we manage to somehow preserve a brain a manner in which the neuron pathways and electrical transmissions are never lost, we have no real way to access that “information”, nor is there a way to tie that brain into the nervous system of a different body.
What happens to the image on a TV when you shut it off? The brain is similar. It’s powered by electric impulses and every single memory that you have, every piece of information you’re not even accessing right now, is just neurons being powered on and being interconnected.
Shut the power down and it all just… goes away.
Well on Voyager they can be salvaged but in TNG they didn’t have the technology yet.
Is the body in the Delta Quadrant, OP?
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