UPDATE – VIDEO recording of the meeting | The next Turing Church meeting in Second Life on Sunday, February 14, will feature a discussion of the recent Brain Preservation Foundation announcement: the Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize has officially been won. The spectacular result achieved by 21st Century Medicine researchers provides the first demonstration that near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain is achievable.

The meeting will take place on Sunday, February 14, at 8:30am Pacific time (11:30am Eastern time, 5:30pm European time, 4:30pm GMT). Please check the time if you are in another timezone.

[Click here to teleport to Stonehenge @Terasem] or teleport directly to Terasem, 180/180/31.

Please take a look at the reading list at the end of the post, and prepare interesting questions and comments.

Preserving the “connectome,” the delicate pattern of neural connections that encodes a person’s memory and identity, could someday in the future permit nanometer-scale scanning of a preserved brain for mind uploading. As I wrote shortly after the first announcement of the Brain Preservation Prize in 2010, brain preservation methods optimized for future nanoscale scanning and mind uploading – “cryonics for uploaders” – could be a good alternative to traditional cryonics for those who consider mind uploading as a viable form of identity preservation.

Picture above: Fred and Linda Chamberlain, cryonics pioneers, founders of Alcor. Fred had his brain placed into cryostasis at Alcor Life in 2012. Fred is wearing a shirt with “Mind uploading – the ultimate out of body experience!”

The meeting will be dedicated to the memory of cryonics activist Javier Ruiz, who left us a few hours ago. If you read Spanish, see this interview with some cryonicists including Javier published 2011 in the Spanish magazine lainformacion.com.

Reading list:

The Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize Has Been Won.

Brain Preservation Foundation announcement.

Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations, by Ken Hayworth.

Implications of the BPF small mammal brain preservation prize, from the prosaic to the profound, by Keith Wiley.

The Cosmos and the Brain – A great week for science.

Brain Preservation Breakthrough Could Usher in a New Era in Cryonics, by George Dvorsky.

Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis elegans, by Natasha Vita-More and Daniel Barranco.

Alcor Position Statement on Brain Preservation Foundation Prize.

Cover image credit: lainformacion.com