Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist and Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia. Working with the Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness laboratory, he investigates novel methods for characterising the nature of conscious experiences to aid in the ongoing quest to understand the neural basis of consciousness.
Zeleznikow-Johnston obtained his PhD from The University of Melbourne, where he researched the mechanisms by which genetic and environmental factors affect cognition in healthy and diseased brains. Zeleznikow-Johnston has been published widely across the field of cognitive neuroscience, from the decline, preservation and rescue of cognitive function at different stages of the lifespan, through to comparing different people’s conscious experience of colour.
As an author, Zeleznikow-Johnston describes how recent neuroscientific advances may enable the suspension of death through brain preservation, potentially offering the dying the chance of future revival (while also exploring the medical, neuroscientific, and philosophical background required to understand this seemingly absurd claim). In a lucid synthesis of current neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is no longer the loss of heartbeat or breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recently invented brain preservation techniques now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds to enable our future revival.
By contributing to research that clarifies the neurobiological, cognitive, and philosophical basis of what it is to be a person, Zeleznikow-Johnston hopes to accelerate the development of medical infrastructure that will help prevent him and everyone else from dying.
