CryoDAO has allocated $259 000 to TOTAL RECALL, the first direct test of whether a memory formed before freezing survives the freezing and rewarming of neurons
CryoDAO has allocated $259 000 to TOTAL RECALL, the first direct test of whether a memory formed before freezing survives the freezing and rewarming of neurons
CryoDAO is a community that funds cryonics research through member votes. On 6 October, co-founder Kai Micah Mills announced proposal CRYO-27, “Total Recall”: $259 000 for a year of work at cryobiologist Gregory Fahy’s laboratory, 21st Century Medicine. Regina Monaco will lead the experiment with Cortical Labs, the developers of the CL-1 biocomputer. The team will train neurons or hippocampal slices, freeze them directly on an electrode array, and test whether the learned response survives rewarming. In parallel, mass spectrometry will compare molecular traces of learning before and after freezing. Voting currently shows unanimous support and closes on 9 October.
In a 2026 PNAS paper, German and colleagues showed that hippocampal slices survive freezing and recover electrical activity and long-term potentiation, a laboratory model of synaptic learning. The tissue’s ability to learn again establishes its general capacity for plasticity. Whether it retains a specific memory formed before freezing is a separate question, one that the proposal’s authors say no one has directly tested before Total Recall.
The plan calls for two independent tests. In the functional test, neurons or hippocampal slices will be trained on a removable multielectrode array, a grid that both stimulates the tissue and records its responses. When a conventional electrode array is reinstalled, its electrodes do not return to exactly the same points on the tissue, so the previously learned response usually cannot be tested. The array in Cortical Labs’ CL-1 platform, the same platform on which neurons in a dish learned to play Pong in 2022, can be removed from its module with the tissue still attached, frozen, and returned without losing contact. Vitrification, an ultrafast freezing process that avoids the ice crystals that would normally rupture cells from within, will take place directly on this array. After rewarming, the same array will test whether the learned response remains. In parallel, imaging mass spectrometry will compare chemical traces of learning across 20 samples: trained and untrained, frozen and unfrozen.
Together, these two approaches address one of the central questions in cryopreservation: whether the information that constitutes a memory survives freezing
Mills wrote this in his announcement. Brett Kagan, a co-developer of CL-1, will handle training and remote access to the system. Nick Llewellyn of the cryonics organization Alcor will supply hippocampal slices, which remain viable there for at least two weeks. The DAO will fund an assistant, equipment, and Monaco’s relocation for this year of work. Her institute will cover her salary, and 21CM will provide laboratory support. The CL-1 equipment purchased with CryoDAO funds will remain the DAO’s property and move to its future laboratory.
If the learned response is detectable in neither the electrical signals nor the molecular traces, the experiment will provide the first direct answer to a question that cryonics, as a strategy for preserving personal identity, has so far left open. The authors consider this outcome unlikely. The proposal cites more than fifteen types of organisms that have survived freezing, including C. elegans roundworms whose learned odor preference has already survived vitrification. These worms, however, have 302 neurons, compared with the billions in a mammalian brain. Direct evidence for the preservation of mammalian memory is still lacking. If the learned response survives freezing, CryoDAO will have grounds to extend the test to a whole rabbit brain. Fahy has already demonstrated brain vitrification without chemical fixation in this species: neurons and synapses remained intact under the microscope, although their function was not tested.