Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist and a Research Fellow at Monash University in Australia and is the author of The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

Transcript

Peter Hayward: Can we preserve ourselves, our identity, our brains, so we could be revived in the future?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: This idea of being able to preserve people with a hope to being able to revive them at some point in the future, where the basic motivation is, like we've seen that science and medicine is progressing over time.

It seems likely that there's people dying of diseases today, that at some point in the future we'd be able to cure or treat, the question is, can we do anything with people who are dying today to, if we can't treat their disease, at least put them on pause until we can, heal them at some point in the future.

Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on Future Pod Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, who is a neuroscientist at Monash University and the author of the Future Loves You. Welcome to FuturePod Ariel.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston:Thanks for having me.

Peter Hayward: Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. One of our previous guests, John Smart, sent me a message saying, you have to talk to this guy. So here you are.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Thanks, John.

Peter Hayward: So as is our way in Future Pod, Our first question we ask all our guests is what's their story? So what's Ariel's story? How did you yeah. Ultimately finish up writing a book like The Future Loves You.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: So I've always been interested in the future and past of like scientific, technological, medical developments. Like when I was a little kid, I was absolutely fascinated with like science books and space, and wanted to be an astronaut.

And then as I got a little bit older, I realized it's pretty hard for Australians to become an astronaut. But the other thing that I was really fascinated by and have almost always been fascinated by was like neuroscience. This question of like, how is it that like the physical material in our heads gives rise to like our thoughts in our feelings, in our experiences, and also like how do we keep that stuff.

Going in a way that keeps us alive over time. Like this whole set of like interesting practical medical and philosophical questions. So I got into that as a teenager and then went on to study that at university and did my PhD and became a proper neuroscientist. But at the,

Peter Hayward: I like that are proper neuroscientists.

Are there improper ones?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Only in so far as there's a lot of people are interested in the questions either from a psychology practice or a. Medical practice and there's a lot of ways to engage with yeah. These sorts of questions. But it it takes a long time and a lot of training to like really get a grip on Yeah.

All the different aspects that can go on.

Peter Hayward: In my own PhD, which was around futures thinking and futures consciousness I very lightly surveyed the literature. This is back, almost 30 years ago. Can you give us an idea of where the field is now because I'm it then.

Scientists couldn't understand what the hell consciousness was. Some some said it was just a property of structure and that's all there is to it. And yeah. But what's the, what is the latest as you would do it, describe the

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: state of it? Yeah, so I think a good way of putting it is, I think a month or two ago in Nature Neuroscience, which is one of the biggest journals that there is for neuroscience.

There were a series of three papers. Where one group of neuroscientists studying consciousness called the other side of the field, a bunch of pseudo scientists then that's how the field responded back saying no, what they're doing is very reasonable and like the other side is wrong. And then there was a third smaller camp that was basically talking about how we know some stuff, but there's a huge amount we don't know and we're doing a bad job of making progress.

So I would say in comparison to. People studying how cancer cells work or even neuroscience, trying to understand other aspects of how the brain works, like fundamental aspects of how memories are formed or how hormones are regulated or that sort of stuff. We are a long way from making good progress, so it's not looking great.

That's not to say we don't know anything and there aren't useful experimental paradigms, but for all the important questions, like how do you know if. Like what, what exactly gives rise to consciousness in the brain? Or is an AI conscious or octopus's conscious or other animals? The short answer is we don't know.

Peter Hayward: That's, yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And obviously AI has has i'd say it's always made the conversation, but it's brought the conversation really into the forefront because people are now looking at the exterior behavior of the large language models. Yeah. And saying based on the way they seem to understand and interpret and communicate.

I seem intelligent. Others are going, nah, it's just programming. It's just programming.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. There's the question of to what degree does intelligence and consciousness come apart? It's where we can define intelligence just by, in a general sense, the like problem solving capabilities of something like how generally can this.

Device, can this entity, can this animal solve new problems that it's given? I is like a broad definition of intelligence, whereas consciousness, we can't define in the same sort of behavioral way from the outside it's more about what it feels like on the inside. What does it feel like to see colors or feel pain or have these sorts of internal experiences.

And we just don't know for different entities, whether they do or don't have anything it feels like to be them on the inside. Yeah. Which is, yeah,

Peter Hayward: I used to try and explain the way I would hack it in the classroom. Ariel was, I would say we live our lives from the inside out. Everyone else lives the experience of us from the outside in.

Yeah. And we only ever know our own interior. And we have to, I have to give you the benefit of doubt that you've got an interior. 'cause I have no real way of. Understanding if you do or you're done. Yeah.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: There's two situations. So the AI one is like the new thing that's really making people think about these problems hard because it's really a pressing concern of are these increasingly capable artificial intelligences conscious or not?

Does it feel like anything? And if they are, do we have like obligations to use them in particular ways or treat them in particular ways? But the flip side is. And the reason why this has been a concern, at least with in clinical practice for a long time, is there's plenty of cases where people have pretty extensive brain injuries where they become paralyzed or unable to speak or unable to communicate, but there's still some brain activity and some function left.

And the question is, in these locked in patients, is there still something it feels like to be that person on the inside, even if they can't talk? Or is there no one home?

Peter Hayward: Yeah. Is there was that wonderful book that became a film of the person who was locked in a body for quite a long period of time and came out and actually explained that for all the time.

I couldn't, you couldn't sense that I was, I. Alive. I was alive. I was I was interpreting. I was hearing, I was listening. Yeah.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: There's one famous study I do talk about in one of the chapters of the book where they took a bunch of people who were locked in, unable to move or in any way do any sort of behavioral thing, but they tested them.

By, they ask them a series of questions like, yes, no questions. Do you have a brother? Or Did you live in Paris? Or something to that effect. And they get them to try and imagine playing tennis. If the answer was yes or to imagine walking around their home or moving through their home, if the answer was no.

And the reason why they did this is like those light up distinctly different areas of the brain. So they scan them while asking them these questions, and the vast majority of them had no brain activity that tracked the correct answers, but a few of them did, even though they weren't behaviorally unresponsive.

I. They were behaviorally unresponsive, which was good evidence for there was still someone home in these patient's bodies. And they could communicate, but only through this sort of like sophisticated brain imaging style thing. Yeah, it's definitely a pertinent question.

Peter Hayward: I listened to some of your other podcasts and you certainly are a great podcast guest.

Let's talk about what it means to understand if someone's dead. 'cause I think that's a great conversation to lead into where you stand. So have we always known when someone is dead?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. It's a it seems initially people have a pretty good grip on this and definitely doctors have a good grip on this, right?

Like we ask them to arbitrate when someone's alive and when someone's. Died. We have this sense that, there's the machines hooked up to someone and they're going beep. And then they stop like in the TV shows, and then that's it, the person's died. In reality though it's a lot more complicated trying to adjudicate this in quite a few different scenarios.

And I think giving a bit of a historical overview of how we've defined and diagnosed death helps make this more understandable. So prior to the middle of the 20th century or so, it actually was reasonably simple where someone was declared dead, basically if they stopped breathing or their heart stopped beating.

Because at that time point, there wasn't really anything you could do for someone anymore from that point onwards. But with the invention of things like mechanical ventilators that could, help someone breathe even if their lungs had failed, or cardiopulmonary bypass machines, which could keep someone's blood flowing, even if their heart had stopped.

It became apparent that we needed a more sophisticated definition of death. And in the 1970s, in the US in particular there were discussions by ethicists and doctors and legislators trying to come up with a more formal, newer definition of death. And they came up with something called the Uniform Determination of Death Act.

In the US where from that point onwards, someone could be diagnosed as death as dead. Sorry. Based on either one of two definitions. The first was irreversible cessation of all heart and lung functions, so the sort of old definition, but the newer one was also irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain.

Or what we think about these days as brain dead. And so that's what's used when, for example, if someone's had extremely severe brain injuries and they're never gonna regain consciousness, and that, that doesn't seem to be really any brain activity left, but with life support, someone's heart and lungs can still be kept going.

Those are the circumstances where doctors may say, oh, this person, even though their heart and lungs are still going, they're brain dead, so that they're actually dead. Now that was an improvement over previous historical definitions. But even when that new brain death definition was started to become used, people at the time realized there were still problems with that one, and essentially for two different reasons.

One is the definition relied on declaring people as having had cessation of all brain functions. But if you actually look in the brains of people commonly declared brain dead while kept on life support, there's often still little bits of activity going on. So they're hypothalamus, for example, a region involved in like regulating body temperature and hormones is often still working in these.

And doctors say that, that doesn't really count. That's not what's important for consciousness and memories and personality and all that stuff. And I agree with them. Like I, I don't think it counts, but it is a problem for trying to define someone as dead based on cessation of all brain functions.

It seems like what they really mean is important brain functions. Yeah. So that's the first, the second part is. It depends on irreversible cessation of all brain functions, and obviously we want it to be irreversible because you have circumstances where someone might have anesthesia or hypothermia or other circumstances where brain functions stop for a while, but then they come back and we don't wanna declare these people as dead.

But the issue is as technology advances, we're getting better and better at taking situations where what was previously irreversible cessation of brain function

Peter Hayward: can be reversed, is

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: becoming more reversible. Yeah. And so it's then how do you draw the lines? So those are the historical problems.

And then I can explore it if you want, but there, there's some ideas about what a, a newer and better definition of death that really captures what people mean might be.

Peter Hayward: I think this is where you step in with it seems to make sense that if we can reverse what seemingly irreversible in terms of brain and brain function, then this idea, which is not a new idea, but the idea of brain preservation and I.

Do you wanna maybe take the story up there? 'cause this is where you start. Yeah.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Maybe to give the last piece then from before. Given these problems with the current medical definition of death that's used in the US and Australia and in most jurisdictions around the world, even from the 1980s or so.

There were proposals for other definitions and one of the key ones that was given, I think initially by a couple of bioethicists at Harvard in the eighties and also a computer scientist was one saying look, it, it doesn't seem like what's important for survival is, someone's heart functioning or their lungs functioning or brain activity that controls their body posture.

It seems like what we really care about is is someone still conscious? Do they hold onto their memories? Do they have the same personality? Do they keep all these psychological properties that make them the same person? And they said if that's what we care about, then we should be defining someone as dead when they've lost these things in a permanent sense, essentially saying death is the loss of personal identity.

And if you use that sort of definition, which I think is a stronger and more defensible definition of what deaths should be, then the implication is someone hasn't died. If they're under anesthesia, when, the, they can be brought back to consciousness later and they haven't died when they've undergone hypothermia.

Sometimes we have circumstances where people get. Lowered to cold temperatures for maybe an hour or a couple of hours. They have complete cessation of brain function. All the electrical activity stops, but then we're able to warm them back up again and they go back to being conscious. And then the weird implication is and this is what I write about in the book, that maybe it's the case that if you took someone and you preserve their brain in a way where they were unconscious, inert, unchanging, basically in stasis for an indefinite period of time, but you did so in a way where you knew all the information in their brain that specified their memories and their personality and their way of being.

If you were pretty confident that was still there. And at some point in the future could probably be revived and restored to consciousness. Then the argument is that person, even though they're preserved and can't be revived now, is still not truly dead.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. It's, as I said that's and I think you, and I think you started to.

OB mean, obviously you heard of cryo and all the stuff that started when people were basically, building big, huge big nitrogen chunks and saying that we can freeze you or we can freeze your head. So this is something that kind of, I was certainly aware of through the eighties and seventies.

Yeah, it, but. And you certainly leaned into it. So you want, do you wanna talk about that stuff? Yeah.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. So it's not a new idea.

This idea of being able to preserve people with a hope to being able to revive them at some point in the future, where the basic motivation is, like we've seen that science and medicine is progressing over time.

And I think, yeah, it's, as you say certainly from at least the 20th century, there were people who noticed. Like natural phenomena where if you cooled stuff down, it seemed to preserve it to a degree. So there's obvious things like our fridges and freezers where we store food for longer durations.

But there's also some stuff, like there are these frogs, for example, in the Arctic, which every winter they they essentially freeze and then in spring they thaw out and go back to hopping around. And indeed we can even get this kind of to work for indefinite periods of time for small bits of human biology.

So these days we routinely use cold temperatures to store eggs and sperm and embryos as part of IVF procedures. And there's sometimes cases where embryos have been stored for decades before being thought out and leading to live successful pregnancies and live births at the end. So yeah, the idea's been around for a while.

The issue is it's hard to scale from these sort of small creatures up to larger organisms or organs. And that's for a variety of reasons. So the first is if you just try and like just use cold temperatures directly then as you cool biology down, you'll get the formation of ice. So the water inside will turn to ice and it will crystallize, and those crystals will puncture cells cause a whole bunch of damage.

And that gets worse. The the bigger the thing you're trying to preserve is. Yep. People noticed that this was an issue and in particularly in the seventies and the eighties people started to develop what we call cryo protectants or essentially antifreeze so that when you cool tissues down instead of ice forming.

The material essentially formed a kind of glass, a non crystalline glass, and that's what's used today in like current preservation, cryo preservation of embryos. They vitify it, they turn it into a glass, and that works really well. The problem is, again, it doesn't work so well when you try and scale up to bigger bits of biology.

For a couple of reasons. One is because the cryo protectants or the antifreeze itself can be somewhat toxic, but the second issue is that it can cause dehydration of tissues of organs or whole bodies. And it's, yeah, it's for this reason, for example, that we can't currently bank. Kidneys or other organs from patients, which is a real shame because it really reduces our ability to make good use of transplant situations.

But in particular, if you try and preserve an entire human body just using this cryopreservation with these antifreeze chemicals, what you typically see is that the brains of people preserved this way shrink by something like 30 to 50% or so. And if you look at them under a microscope, they don't look like they've been well preserved.

Yeah that's been a real historical issue with chronic as practiced where it's not clear that they're giving good quality preservation of the structures in the brain that we think are linked to storing someone's memories and personality and such things.

Peter Hayward: Yeah.

So Ariel, given what you've said about the state of brain preservation technology. If somebody had a terminal illness diagnosis, now what's available right here, right now? If a person wanted to do this?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. Certainly less developed infrastructure than I would like, but not absolutely nothing. So specifically talking about, the fixation techniques that I've been mentioning as opposed to just traditional cryonics the. The main organization that I'm aware of that exists is one called Oregon Brain Preservation on the west coast of the US that's currently actually performing these preservation services.

And another one that is hoping to start to provide services quite soon is called Nectome, also based in Oregon in the west coast of the United States. In addition, the cryonics provider Tomorrow Biostasis in Europe and they've actually just started to move into the US is also interested in providing fixation services.

And I know they do sometimes, but I'm not fully on top of when they do or when they don't. Or if as a patient you ask them what they're willing to provide or not. So there's a few, but they're still very small and, restricted to particular geographic areas as opposed to being broadly available.

Peter Hayward: And this is not to bring criticism to health providers, but if somebody wanted to pursue this in Australia, they would have to actually obviously discuss and plan for it with Australian practitioners. And one would imagine this is not something that you can do necessarily post death. This has to be planned in the lead up to death. Am I right?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah, that's correct. Because the, the issue is that as soon as someone's heart stops and their blood flow stops, their body starts to decay quite quickly. It's not exactly clear how long there's a window post, cessation of.

Blood flow, right? It could be as soon as half an hour to an hour or so. It could be as long as maybe a couple of days. Assuming the body's kept it room temperature, there might be a little bit more of a window if it's kept it cooler temperatures. But even if the body and the brain hasn't decayed enough, it becomes harder and hotter to actually.

Get the fixative chemicals into someone, do the preservation procedure. So it's really something that you want to have planned ahead of time and have access to people who can perform the procedure. Basically lining it up ahead of time. And in definitely in Australia at the moment, most I.

Doctors won't even have heard about these procedures or know much about them or know how to help, even if they are like in principle, willing to support a patient in this they're not gonna know what to do.

Peter Hayward: No, and I would imagine Ariel, that it's a bit like the assisted dying. Process in that there are doctors who are supportive of it, there are doctors who are opposed to it.

If you are in a situation where then you'd be looking for actually practitioners who wanted to support you, there's obviously ways to find out who those people are. They're probably not thick on the ground, but. They will be around,

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Indeed in Australia. Unfortunately, I don't know any in other parts of the world.

Some of the people working at those companies I mentioned before are doctors. So I think the heads of services and research at both Tomorrow Biostasis, and at Oregon Brain Preservation are both doctors, for example. And I know there's others who are more sympathetic because I speak to them.

But again it's not a huge number of people at the moment.

Peter Hayward: So let's just step out of obviously the technology is continuing and obviously we will see progress in here. I wanna step back to the sort of societal, political level in terms of our. Our ability as a society to actually have conversations about this and what are, what's your awareness of our, if you like it, maturity, to talk about this and also how does that flow on to some of the scenarios as to how this, because it's not gonna stop, this is going to continue.

So what are some of the scenarios that you think emerge in this space?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: I think if you take seriously this prospect of preservation that it has any possibility or there's any merit to the idea, then. On the one hand, it's hopeful because it means that, maybe there's something we can do for patients today who would like to live longer, but who can't be maintained actively at the moment.

But on the other hand, it's also extremely confronting because it means that instead of, accepting. Death acquiescing to the natural processes of decay that happen and just going along for the ride, as unpleasant as that might be, one has to really worry about what is happening during end of lifetimes?

What can we do? What can't we do? Which risks can we mitigate and which are unavoidable and deal with the extremely messy, depressing complicated aspects of all of these things. And that can be quite scary, I think as well. And confronting and depressing and yeah, there, there's both hopeful elements and scary elements to it, I guess is the broad overview.

Peter Hayward: Have you talked about this with your friends and family?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah, I do this on a one-on-one sort of situation where certainly like when I talk publicly to people, I talk about this in a broad context and the technology and the overall philosophy. But I'm not a medical practitioner myself nor a sociologist of death, nor I'm not trained specifically at getting into the.

Cultural or counseling sort of aspects of this. So for me personally, it only, I do this directly with my friends and family members. Now, my friends and family are probably a little bit weird and a little bit more sympathetic to this. They're also more medical than others. So they are the sorts of people who think about these issues more and a force to confront them more often.

So I have it on easy mode. When I'm talking to them. But even then, it's still like still not a pleasant conversation to be having.

Peter Hayward: No, but it, but there's something about, I would comment from, from the grandstand so to speak, that, what I observe generally around people that I know is that we don't actually have a very robust culture of talking about.

Whole of life and end of life. We are not comfortable with it. People, when I was a child, which is a long time ago, I was actually it was common when people passed that you would go and see the body and you would have a viewing and it was often people died in place rather than necessarily in a medical institution.

And it seems that. At a broad level, we're not a very sophisticated group because we just don't talk about it. And I wonder whether part of it is what you said, your family have talked about it, therefore they've developed some literacy, some familiarity, just simply talking about it.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. So this is wild speculation and I wanna be very clear for your listeners that I, this is very much speculation, but a century or two ago when we had very little medical technology and very little access to medical services, it was typical for people to, die in their homes, die in their beds with their family around them.

And we had more rituals around how that would work and how people could see it. And, connect to it, and at the same time, we were also a more religious society, so we had more views of like people would continue on in the afterlife. As far as I can see in, in recent times, we've had both people becoming less religious and more secular, so less thoughts of living on in the afterlife and also.

As medical technology's improved, we often feel like there's more that should be able to be done. But that comes with the cost of then handing over these sorts of rituals and situations to hospitals, medical practitioners, those sorts of things. As good as those benefits are though, it.

It doesn't always work and towards, as people get older and older, there's less and less we can do for people. And then we end up in this awkward situation today where we expect a lot of medicine. But eventually it fails. But we've lost the coping strategies, I guess that Yeah. We used to have around these things.

And that's, yeah, that's very painful and awkward. And, people don't know what to do. They don't know what rituals to have. That's not everyone. These are very broad generalizations like.

Peter Hayward: Oh no, I, no, there are certainly living cultures right here, right now on planet Earth that actually have a very mature ability to talk about whole of life, whole of death.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. There's a great book that I took as inspiration in part for my own, which is I. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, who's a doctor and writer in the us, which really goes through this in a lot of depth about what's changed and how, maybe how we could be improving things around this.

It's funny, like this sort of work on palliative care and confronting death is like 99% the same sort of ideas. That I would like to push as well, where it's like, as a society, we need to confront these things, talk about them, talk about the realities of what's gonna happen. My only difference is I'm a little bit more hopeful that like maybe we can actually also do something.

But yeah it's, it's a difficult conversation to have.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. And the other one too, of course, being explored by science fiction writers, of course, is. It's one thing to wake up in the future, but if nobody wakes up in the future that you knew, then you are almost in that situation of you are by yourself in the future.

And so how does that play out socially and just the whole process you want? One would imagine you want to extend your life, but also possibly extend the life of your friends and family and partners and. Parents and everything else. This gets very socially and technologically complicated, doesn't it?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah. I think about this as the extreme of all medical technology, where the idea it's empowering people and it's preventing, nature from just taking its course. It's preventing people from just having to acquiesce to fate and giving them as individual choices over their health and over their lives and, even just individuals accessing it alone, I think is still something that they should be able to do in the absence of, other community. What's the right way of putting this? Even if someone could only access it for themselves without, for whatever reason their family wanting to then I think that's still something that they should have access to.

And I think people can still have. Meaningful futures as a result of this. The analogy I always think of is my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and they thankfully survived with some of their family, but I heard from friends examples of grandparents they had. Where they lost everything during World War II in Europe.

And then they came to Australia completely by themselves with absolutely nothing. But then upon arriving here, they found work, they found new friends, they made new community for themselves, and they went on to have very meaningful lives. And that's the analogy I think of if I imagine, someone taking this preservation procedure and them being the only one who.

Used it out of their particular community, I, it could still be meaningful for them. But on the other hand, like obviously it's better if their friends and family and community wants to come along with them. And they have more of that, that they're able to take with them into the future. That would be my hope.

Peter Hayward: When you were researching the book, you did do research on people's perceptions for whether they're prepared to accept something like this. What did you find with the research? With the research? Yeah.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: It's funny. It's very interesting. It depends on exactly how one asks the question around this. So for example, if you ask young people how long they'd like to live, most people say something like 90 ish years or so. Typically they pick something like 10 years longer than their demographic is statistically likely to get. But as they get older, the number creeps up, and particularly as long as they're in good health.

They, that number continues to creep up. And in particular and the more like, interesting and confronting research is if you ask people who are terminally ill, so people in hospices, for example, how strong their will to live is, whether they'd like to continue on. You find that something like 70% of them still describe having a very strong will to live.

Even when they're imminently dying. And the thing that affects that is more just like whether they're in extreme pain and nausea, where you can find examples where people describe having low well to live, but if you treat their, their nausea and their pain, then it goes back up again. I. So the first part is to say in principle people would like to live longer than they're typically able to get.

Now if you are asking specifically about, preservation as a method as opposed to something just like an anti-aging pill I suspect both, like people don't know very much about it and it sounds like weird and scary and sci-fi. So when people have done these sorts of surveys they've found something like 5% of general population can be interested.

But this is from online surveys hasn't been done in very large numbers, but there's a discrepancy between obviously, even 5% of people saying they're interested and the current level of uptake, which is like much, much less than that at the moment. But I don't know to what degree that is.

Genuinely, people aren't interested. Versus they haven't heard about it versus it's too difficult for them to access versus concerns that it's weird. There's a lot of research still to be done here about, who would actually take this up, under which circumstances, with what degree of public perception and acceptability and such things.

Peter Hayward: In a purely hypothetical, and this is not gonna be something that you have to face for a long time, but would you wanna take it up if it was a, if you needed to, even with the current situation?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Oh, absolutely. I am interested in this. I. To help. I think everyone should be able to access this, and it's not just for my own sake that I want this to exist, but I definitely do want it to exist for my own sake.

Insofar as, if I was given a terminal cancer diagnosis, let's say and given 12 months to live or so, I definitely want this to be available for me towards the end of that period so that I had some chance of being able to live longer in the future. I really like being alive. I. Seeing my friends and family gonna parties eating ice cream, reading books going on, podcasts I'd like to have more time for that if possible.

Peter Hayward: Cool. So you've written the book, you have got your university position. Is this something that you tick off and move on and go on to do other things or is this the beginning of what you, if I call it a life's work or a mission?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah, I definitely, the beginning of the work, it's not just me.

There's a few other people working in this space as well, but I don't think our job is finished until either. The medical community and neuroscientific community can prove to us that this is actually nonsense and will never work, which I'm increasingly skeptical of, or this is integrated into the medical system as something that all terminally ill people have access to if they want to, where it's like fully incorporated into hospices, hospitals, end of life planning, that sort of thing. Because I genuinely do think that this should be an option that should be available to all who would want it, and I think it could be done for, not that much money.

Within the scope of what we already provide to patients generally.

Peter Hayward: If listeners are interested in finding out more about this just because it's either, either something that they could support or whatever else, your contact details will be given as part of the podcast, but are there actually people in groups that people can actually contact about

this?

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah, so the book as you said, and the newsletter that I provide are good access points to initially get some information about this. The organization that I work with the Brain Preservation Foundation also has a website and a bunch of resources on it for those who'd like to get more in depth detail about what's happening.

Those are probably the main initial sources. Otherwise, there's some information on Reddit and other online communities that people could check out as well. But I'd recommend contacting the Brain Preservation Foundation or signing up to my newsletter if they want to see what's going on.

Peter Hayward: It's a fascinating area. As you've explained, this is from the way we have pushed death further and further. People's lives and that this is just another one of those things that pushes death. It doesn't prevent it just simply just extends life.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Yeah, the whole point is that this is not actually about stopping. It's not about reversing death in that it's about reframing exactly what it means to die, where what it is to die is to lose one's personal identity permanently. And in the same sense that someone isn't dead, if they're under deep anesthesia or they're not dead, if they're in induced hypothermia from which they can be revived already.

Things that we do routinely in clinical practice, that there's a strong argument to be made that if you preserve someone properly. They're also still not dead, and what really makes them is still there. And there's some reasonable chance that you could revive that person at some point in the future.

And yeah, that, that's the main idea that I'm trying to convey to people through this.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, Ariel, for the book and for being such a great guest. I hope the book goes well and maybe we can get you back on the pod in a couple of years and you can explain how this conversation has moved forward. And thanks too for spending some time with the Future Pod community.

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston: Thanks for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

Peter Hayward: Thanks Ariel. Links to the book are included in Ariel's show notes, as is his contact details if you want to reach out to him. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website.I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.