How would you go about donating?

UK: How would I go about donating my brain to science? Both living and once dead?

• I hope a donation when dead is not for many years, but of course, this is a world were unfortunate events will and do happen and I can't guarantee a long life. How would I go about donating my brain to science? I am already on the organ donation register, but I am unsure if this will mean my brain will be donated to science? Now for living; you see it in many documentaries and the such, where people volunteer and participate in studies at numerous Universities world wide, having scans, taking part in simple experiments, for example experiments for spacial awareness. How would I go about applying for such a study?

• Answer:

  Liam, the somewhat general answer is you would have to decide what types of studies you would like to participate in, and then locate sponsoring universities near you that are engaged in those studies. What you will find is that most of the detailed studies are undertaken to investigate specific genetic or neurodevelopmental disorders like Fragile X, autism, or Turner syndrome. The things that will be available to you will be constrained by funding of the studies, and that may not match your interests. I know that Stanford University has traditionally also done brain studies on individuals with a family history of reading disabilities. Here's a link that may interest you about that program (a Stanford university newsletter): http://cibsr.stanford.edu/EdNeurosciNewsletter.pdf I know the program was active as recently as fall 2010 and it may be ongoing. There are also occasional small studies that use PET scans to examine the link between glucose transport, bioenergetics, and behavior. You would need to research these individually, once again with the local universities. As for your postmortem brain, there are few studies done beyond ones examining gross neuroanatomy, lesions, or correlates of aphasic stroke in patients who had lost speech. Unless your brain is highly atypical in one of these ways, or perhaps you become world famous like Einstein (which incidentally I would not rule out for you!), few will care about your brain after death save your family, perhaps. And now my lad, let the poet in me speak to your desire to 'donate [your] brain to science.' The surest way is to devote your life to scientific inquiry, to be guided by it in your thoughts. It will not result in MRIs or images you can proudly hold up to proclaim your uniqueness. But it will make your brain worthy of study; it will form it in ways most people could scarcely imagine, and yes, it will make your life richer. We are here for a reason: to ask questions, to seek, and to answer them, and even the best of us will die trying. Still, your life will be a noble one, and that is how you will donate your brain. You can do this in other arenas besides the overtly scientific. If you adopt a cultural materialist perspective, you can do it as a historian. If we are darkly admonished that 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,' then let me say that all roads are dark, and all wisdom, whether won through sloth or exuberant excess, is both painful and life giving. The wise man gives nothing less than his life because he knows that it why it has been given to him...