Imagine
yourself ten years from now and that your body is failing you. The only part of your being that is still functioning
properly is your head. You’re given the
option of transplanting your head onto a brand new body: a perfectly healthy
body. Do you do it? Would you still be the same person? Is a new body worth all of the potential
risks? Would head transplants for
medical reasons begin a slippery slope to head transplants for cosmetic
purposes? The idea of a head transplant
sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, but it may be closer than
we think, and these are the sorts of questions that are being asked.
While
it may seem impossible, Sergio Canavero – an Italian neuroscientist – claims that
the medical technology to perform a head transplant is already here, the world
just needs to embrace it. In the 1970s
there was an attempted transplant of one monkey head to the body of another
monkey. The transplant was technically successful,
but the monkey was unable to move its body and was only able to breathe with
help. It then died eight days
later.
This
certainly doesn’t sound successful to me, but Canavero claims that science and
technology have advanced enough that not only could a head transplant be
successful, but if embraced by the scientific community it could be successful
on humans in just two years! He claims
that by cleanly severing the head from the spinal cord and using a mixture of
chemicals to fuse the spinal cord together on the new body, the person would wake
up with all of their own memories and would be able to walk after only a year
of therapy.
While this entire idea is fascinating,
Canavero himself exhibits many signs of creative thinking. He appears to have strong intrinsic
motivation, something that Collins and Amabile note is essential to a creative
mind. The idea of a head transplant is likely
to be controversial. There is a strong
likelihood that the idea will not be accepted by the scientific community, and
that all of his research and theories become irrelevant since they cannot truly
be tested. Canavero also seems to
exhibit the “six resources” that Lubart and Sternberg address in their chapter “An
Investment Approach to Creativity: Theory and Data”. The six resources that they address are
intellectual processes, knowledge, intellectual styles, personality,
motivation, and environmental context.
Canavero clearly exhibits a tendency toward problem solving in his
intellectual process, as he took previous work done and came up with what he
believes could be a successful solution – fusing the spinal cord. His knowledge cannot be discounted as he had
to do a lot of research in order to come up with a possible solution, and his
intellectual style seems to be a combination of global and local. While a local style is generally associated
with negative creativity according to Lubart and Sternberg, Canavero uses it as
a way of making his global thoughts concrete.
He was able to think about the task in a broad (global) way in order to
realize that fusing the spinal cord successfully would help solve problems
previously experienced, and was then able to use a local style to come up with
a solution of how to fuse the spinal cord.
He exhibits most of the personality traits that Lubart and Sternberg attribute
to a creative personality, which goes along with his intrinsic motivation that
was discussed earlier. Finally, though I
don’t know much about his typical environment, it would follow logically that
he was in an environment that allowed creative thinking since his ideas are not
likely to be accepted without serious controversy.
Who knows if head transplants will
be a reality in the near future, but the fact that it is even being discussed
is in large part thanks to Sergio Canavero.
I certainly don’t know how I feel about the idea, but it will be
interesting to see whether the idea is accepted as something worth
investigating and pursuing.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530103.700-first-human-head-transplant-could-happen-in-two-years.html?page=1#.VQCCYOH7CLM
http://www.medicaldaily.com/first-human-head-transplant-horizon-says-italian-scientist-sergio-canavero-technology-easy-247371
Collins & Amabile: Collins, M. A., & Amabile,
T. M. (1999). Motivation and creativity. In Robert J. Sternberg (Ed.) Handbook
of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lubart & Sternberg: Lubart, T.I., & Sternberg,
R.J. (1995). An investment approach to creativity: theory and data. In S.M.
Smith, T.B. Ward, & R.A. Finke (Eds.) The Creative Cognition Approach (pp.271–302).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
