How we store our memories is still a mystery. The secret seems to lie in the synapses where a dendrite from one brain cell touches the axon of another. But the information may be recorded physically, via the growth of new synapses; or chemically, via the synthesis of special encoding substances. These alter the chance that the synapse will convey a nervous impulse from one neuron to the other, or the chance that the receiving neuron will fire under this stimulation.

To settle the matter by experimenting on living brains is daunting, and maybe unethical as well. So Daedalus plans to study the information content of dead ones. Already organizations exist which will freeze your corpse in liquid nitrogen, and store it until science is sufficiently advanced to thaw you out and restore you to life. If you cannot afford a whole-body cryogenic crypt, you can merely have your head stored instead. In due course, science will then have to give you a new body. Alternatively, says Daedalus, it might be possible to read all the information in your dead and frozen brain. The totality of your experience would thus be captured for posterity — a rather second-class form of immortality, but better than nothing.

DREADCO physiologists are now working out how to do it. They propose sectioning the frozen brain into micron-thin slices with a cryogenic microtome. Each slice will be scanned by electron microscope, and recorded as a digitized image. The resulting 100,000 images will be stored in a terabyte memory, and used to reconstruct the complete synaptic ‘wiring diagram’ of the brain. Its chemical map will be harder to recover. Each slice will have to be treated with fluorescent immunoassay reagents binding to the crucial encoding substances, so as to record their distribution in the slice.

Daedalus cheerfully admits that the resulting vast mass of data will be utterly incomprehensible. But, as with the steadily growing incomprehensible data of the human-genome project, we must hope that one day it will all make sense. In due course science will advance enough to interpret your stored brain map — when your heroic sacrifice will finally bear fruit. Every detail of your life will be recovered, as a fascinating historical record. Secrets you took to the grave will be revealed at last. And if the data can by then be inserted back into a living brain, you might live again as a parasitic consciousness within the mind of someone else.