[336f5]

> This is completely fine if you're tooling around in a research lab or industrial lab, but even a 1% loss is probably too much for a human brain to bear and remain the same as before.

You probably lose at least that many neurons over a lifetime; consider the shrinking volume of the brain with age. And losses definitely easily exceed 1% in early Alzheimer's or dementia, but while not fun, people with early Alzheimer's clearly have not died or ceased to exist!

(And anyway, the real question about the dead cells is whether they still have the information about their synaptic weights and other functional information. Being able to revive the cell is overkill; the focus on revival is as an _a fortiori_ argument, since any revival proves that, even in the absence of future scanning advances, it must be possible.)

[ethbro]

(Not a biology guy)

It would seem like there should be a difference between an operational brain losing neurons and a suspended brain losing neurons?

I'd assume that if inter-neuron communication speed is anywhere on the same order as the time-between-individual-neuron-loss, then that would alleviate the effect somewhat, no? My understanding was there was a lot of redundancy up there, so it would make sense that the brain would resilver itself in certain scenarios.

[JoshTriplett]

> I'd assume that if inter-neuron communication speed is anywhere on the same order as the time-between-individual-neuron-loss, then that would alleviate the effect somewhat, no? My understanding was there was a lot of redundancy up there, so it would make sense that the brain would resilver itself in certain scenarios.

The brain is remarkably resilient and adaptive; people manage to recover at least partial function even after major strokes. And, quite frankly, I'd take "functioning like a stroke victim" over "dead" any day.