March 3, 2015

If you give your brain, are you a donor or recipient?

Improbable Reseach -  Amongst the formidable complexities that would be involved in transplanting someone’s brain, lurks an enigmatic question – if it were yours, would ‘you’ go with your brain? Such questions have been examined by professor Fredrik Svenaeus, of Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden. The professor has a chapter in ‘The Body as Gift, Resource, and Commodity’, ( Södertörn Studies in Practical Knowledge 6, 2012) entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Organ Transplantation: How does the Malfunction and Change of Organs have Effects on Personal Identity’
    “If I get a new brain I (at least possibly) become another person. In this sense, the brain is the only organ that cannot be donated; if you offer your brain to be transplanted into another body, you become a receiver, not a donor, of organs.”

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