Head transplant carried out on monkey

Post Reply New Topic

I don't even understand why this is considered a potentially good thing at all.
Our minds and bodies are so strongly connected. Talk about problems with proprioception!
How is a new head/body combination possibly going to know how to work with each other?
Reattaching nerves and spinal chord healing are one thing.
INTERPRETING the signals sent by those nerves is quite another!
My body is *my body*.
My head is used to the fact that my legs aren't completely straight and that my hips go out of alignment. I've been dealing with this all my life. Put my body with a new head, and that new head isn't going to know a damn thing about it. This is just one example of how our heads and bodies interact.
I think anyone who got this done would be paralyzed, just like the monkey, or at least have severe mobility problems. And not just because of problems with reattaching the spinal chord.
I also think a person could go crazy, not knowing what various signals within the new body MEAN.
It would also be interesting to find out where the source of over- or under-reacting to pain comes from. Does that start in the mind or the body? Can you imagine if you took a head from someone who is under-sensitive to pain and put it on a body that is over-sensitive to pain?
It's hard enough for people to learn to walk with prostethic legs, or to learn how to walk again after a temporary paralysis.
Imagine trying to learn how to work a WHOLE NEW BODY.

This whole thing is unethical and pretty stupid, IMO.

mr_bigmouth_502,

Animals feel pain too even though they cannot express it.

The main problem is one of complexity: separating the sensory nerves from the motor nerves in both the body and the brain, and then determing which nerve goes to which part of the body or the brain. There are literally millions of nerve paths in the spinal cord, and they may not be arranged the same way in any two people. Add in the fact that the splicing must take place through a microscope, and the patient may die of old age before enough connections are made to let him take a dump and wipe himself unassisted!

I wonder why nobody has figured out a way to put an otherwise good head on some kind of life support apparatus ...

How about connecting a disembodied head to a cybernetic body? Think about it - a body that never dies!

How about connecting a disembodied head to a cybernetic body? Think about it - a body that never dies!

this reminds me of the gary Larson cartoon about the scientist whose head is on a life support machine, and he wakes up and is disoriented and yells, "HELP! what happened to my body?!" and another scientist slaps him to his senses and he says, "thanks, I needed that."