Ah, the age-old question: Can we read the minds of the dead? Sadly, no—unless you count really old diaries. Neuroscience hasn't quite reached the point where we can plug into a brain like a USB drive and download someone’s last thoughts. Techniques like fMRI and EEG require actual brain activity, which, as you might guess, is in short supply once someone has kicked the bucket.
However, scientists do study dead brains for insights into diseases and neural structures. But if you’re hoping for a ghostly playback of someone’s final moments, science isn’t there yet.
And then there's the legendary "dead salmon study" of 2009—where researchers put a deceased fish in an fMRI scanner, showed it pictures of humans, and asked it to determine their emotions. (Yes, really.) Shockingly, the fish "responded" with brain activity. This, of course, was a fluke (pun intended) caused by statistical noise, but it highlighted how easily fMRI can be misinterpreted.
So, while brain scanning is great for science, if you’re hoping to have a séance via MRI, you’re out of luck. At least for now.
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What beautiful work.
Congratulations.
Sincerely,
I would observe that death is not an instantaneous event but rather a process in which the body shuts down. Many cells in the body continue to function for some time following the decreed moment of physical death, so just when is a brain "dead". Then there is also the issue of just where are memories stored. Memories can be invoked by stimulating the proper portion of the brain in still living people, but are the invoked memories stored in the site stimulated or merely invoked when the stimulus occurs and actually stored elsewhere?
This is an interesting question to ask, but unfortunately, we do not have sufficient knowledge to even know if its suppositions are valid.
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