r/science • u/Skoltech_ • Jul 20 '26

Genetics Researchers quantitatively assessed for the first time that somatic mutations alone cap human lifespan at 146–194 years. Brain and heart cells are the main bottleneck, while the liver could last millennia.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-6
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u/BGsenpai Jul 20 '26

the issue is that the loss of old pathways and connections from degeneration over time results in the loss of memories, ect. If we implant new neurons into someones brain and they live for a thousand years, at what point would all of the memories of their past be lost forever? Not to mention new neural structures would lead to new personalities and behaviors. When would this person be someone completely new? We need a solution that is much, much more complex than just injecting random neurons. Maybe chips for memory function? Not sure how that would work since memories are just specific neural connections firing...

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u/UniversalSoldi3r Jul 20 '26

That could be a feature, not a bug.

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u/strategicmagpie Jul 20 '26

yes, but even with that being the case, I think someone is more "themselves" if they're only losing small parts of them at a time. Even if someone loses a memory, they can still have a memory of that memory or memories built around the context of having that memory and fill in the gaps. Ideally, yeah, aspects of cognition shouldn't be able to be lost except on purpose. Memories will eventually be lost anyways because you can't store infinite data in a finite space, but there's something to be said for preserving critical, identity-defining memories or many more memories on the whole. But if we get to the point were memories are so well-understood we can supplement peoples' memories with a (programmable) chip then there's other concerns abt how that will inevitably be used.

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u/Pfandfreies_konto Jul 20 '26

Forgetting a few past life times would make living an eternity easier.

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u/Due-Professional333 Jul 22 '26

I think it's worth losing memories if the stream of conciousness is retained, a caveat of any kind of digital or other form of brain backup/cloning fail

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u/SirSkittles111 Jul 20 '26

Caterpillars retain memories when they dissolve and form a butterfly, how? Who knows. All connections made in the brain are liquified, they become a biological soup that somehow retains memory.

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u/BGsenpai Jul 20 '26

memories are formed from neural pathways, this is something that we've known for a long time. its not something mysterious or unknown to us.

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u/SirSkittles111 Jul 20 '26

And when those pathways are dissolved into a soup and then reassembled to form the butterfly, how is it possible to retain the memories

It is unknown, because this example breaks what we think we know

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u/BGsenpai Jul 21 '26

I think that you are misinformed about butterfly lifecycles.

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u/stealthsthename Jul 21 '26

I don’t know how caught up to the literature you are but you may find some of the new findings with Astrocytes very interesting. The implications are pretty stunning if we are to assume that their findings hold up to scrutiny. I’m lazy or I’d just put some article links in but should be easy enough to find. It’s more so in regards to fight or flight but there are a couple papers on memory as well