Can a brain stop working without losing information?
It is a well-established fact that long-term memories are encoded in durable physical and chemical changes. “We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical.” — Page 658, Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986) Loss of brain activity is not only survivable, but sometimes even beneficial for the prevention and treatment of ischemic injury. Further discussion and references can be found in the article Medical Time Travel.
