# Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston **Entity class:** Person **Domain:** Consciousness Science / Brain Preservation **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Developed **Collection:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] · [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] **Primary Sources:** *PLOS One* 20(6): e0326920; *The Future Loves You* (2024) ## Definition **Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist at Monash University in Melbourne who studies methods for characterizing conscious experience, and the corpus's most-quoted advocate of brain preservation as a present option.** He completed his doctorate at the University of Melbourne in 2019 on genetic and environmental influences on cognition. He is the lead author of the 2025 survey that gives the [[wiki/State Sufficiency Problem|State Sufficiency Problem]] its first large-N expert distribution, and the author of *The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death* (Penguin, November 2024). ## Work in the corpus - **[[wiki/What Are Memories Made Of (2025 Survey)|The 2025 survey]]**, with Emil F. Kendziorra (European Biostasis Foundation) and Andrew T. McKenzie (Apex Neuroscience): 312 neuroscientists across engram-research and COSYNE cohorts, published in *PLOS One* on 24 June 2025. Headline results include 70.5% agreement that long-term memory is primarily maintained by connectivity and synaptic strengths, a median 41.0% probability that memories are decodable from an aldehyde-stabilized cryopreserved brain, and median whole-brain-emulation dates of 2045 for *C. elegans*, 2065 for mouse and 2125 for human. - **The book's thesis:** personal identity resides in the brain's structure, so death is the loss of that structure rather than the stopping of the heart. On that basis he treats current preservation methods as a route to future revival and argues the cost is already within reach of most people. These are his stated positions, and the corpus records them as such. - **Quotations already in the vault:** [[wiki/Brain Preservation|Brain Preservation]] and [[wiki/Digital Afterlife|Digital Afterlife]] carry his Reminders on putting the dying on pause and on preservation removing the necessity of death. ## Reading His survey and his advocacy pull in different directions, which is what makes both useful. The survey reports no consensus on which neurophysiological features matter for storage, and its authors disclose ties to preservation and biostasis organizations; a published reviewer questioned the sampling frame. The register treats the result as the field's prior rather than as a settled answer, and notes the most actionable number in it: the 22-point gain in emulation confidence when prior electrophysiological recordings exist, which prices the value of recording a living person's dynamics before preservation. ## Research Inferences These entries translate the forward-looking register in [[research/Research Inferences|Research Inferences]] into ordinary wiki prose. The tier labels apply to the inference, not automatically to every factual anchor inside it. Proposed IDs above INF-0500 come from the 2026-10-23 cycle: [[research/Research Inferences Integration Report - 2026-10-23|Research Inferences Integration Report — 2026-10-23]] · [[research/Research Inferences Integration Audit - 2026-10-23|Research Inferences Integration Audit — 2026-10-23]]. - **INF-0233 — Plausible.** Preserving now and reading later decouples the acquisition timeline from the individual's lifespan, which converts continuity from a race against biology into a storage commitment. Preservation is the only continuity intervention available to people alive today. - **INF-0241 — Analytic.** Defining death as the irreversible loss of the information that specifies a person makes the threshold dependent on future reading technology rather than present medicine. Under that definition the boundary moves as capability improves, which is a coherent and increasingly operational position. - **INF-0436 — Analytic.** Preservation is a call option on future capability with a known premium and an unknown expiry, which makes it analyzable with ordinary decision theory. Framing it as an option rather than a belief removes most of the rhetorical heat from the question. - **INF-0449 — Unresolved.** Whether a given preservation preserves enough is testable in animals by preserving, scanning, emulating, and comparing against pre-preservation behavior. That experiment is fundable today at small-animal scale and would settle the field's central question empirically. ## Relationships - **author_of:** [[wiki/What Are Memories Made Of (2025 Survey)|What Are Memories Made Of (2025 Survey)]] · *The Future Loves You* (2024). - **institution:** Monash University; doctorate from the University of Melbourne (2019). - **co-authors:** Emil F. Kendziorra (European Biostasis Foundation) · Andrew T. McKenzie (Apex Neuroscience). - **quoted_in:** [[wiki/Brain Preservation|Brain Preservation]] · [[wiki/Digital Afterlife|Digital Afterlife]]. - **subject_matter:** [[wiki/Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation|Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation]] · [[wiki/State Sufficiency Problem|State Sufficiency Problem]] · [[wiki/Whole-Brain Emulation|Whole-Brain Emulation]]. - **field_peers:** [[wiki/Brain Preservation Foundation|Brain Preservation Foundation]] · [[wiki/Nectome|Nectome]]. - **cluster_home:** [[wiki/Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] · [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]]. ## Sources - [What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory — PLOS One, 24 June 2025](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12186944/) - [The Future Loves You — Penguin](https://penguin.co.uk/books/456834/the-future-loves-you-by-zeleznikow-johnston-ariel/9781802063806) - [Royal Institution talk listing](https://rigb.org/node/5823) As of 23 October 2026.