- Researchers in Texas crafted a device meant to help isolate the brain for scientific study.
- By keeping the brain alive and functioning separate from the body for hours, experts believe that they can improve heart-lung bypass technology.
- This sci-fi-like concept was first modeled in pigs, but humans could be next.
When a pig recently went under anesthesia at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, it was for anything but a routine procedure. Researchers were able to isolate blood flow to the brain, separate that brain from the rest of the body, and use a new device to keep the brain alive and functioning.
The pig brains were all on their own for five hours. And they did just fine, thanks to the new extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC) device.
“This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent of the body, allowing us to answer physiological questions in a way that has never been done,” Juan Pascual, professor at UT Southwestern, said in a statement.
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If the brain was alive there’s reason to think there was experience taking place. Apparently the pig was anaesthetized with ketamine before this happened, but the brain was active for five hours after being removed from the body. I hope it was kept unconscious; otherwise it can’t have been pleasant. I wonder what kinds of ethical controls there are on such experiments.
The paper (from August 2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-39344-7
Is there any way to know how the brain would perceive it’s senses when detached completely?
Just severing the nerves makes me wonder if it experienced full body pain with blind, deaf, and paralyzed. Or would severing the nerves make it painless since there’s no nerves to send signals?
It’d be pain from the severed nerve endings where they are severed and phantom “limb” from the body at worst.
But the brain was on ketamine so it was probably the happiest that pig has ever been, ironically enough.