Could you live forever? The neuroscience behind brain preservation, consciousness and death

Would you want to live for longer? Forever? Have your mind preserved and uploaded into something non-human? And is it even possible? Neuroscientist Dr Ariel Zeleznikow explores challenging ideas about life and death.   From adding a few decades onto a life span, to suspending the aging process altogether, and more radically, uploading a preserved brain and consciousness into an entirely different physical structure, Ariel's research is at the cutting edge of neuroscience. These seem like strange ideas, scientifically and morally, but Ariel says that with the advent of new techniques of brain preservation and the recent successful attempts at mapping consciousness, we could be looking at drastically longer lives in the future. This episode of Conversations explores weird science, epic stories, brain preservation, the aging process, how to stop ageing, getting older, brains, minds, souls, humanity, morality, lifespan, cancer, brain disease, Walt Disney, cryogenic freezing, genomes, biology, neurology, philosophy, ethics. The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death is published by Penguin.