[Bored chemist]

Some parts of the brain act like memory storages.

Please show me the bits that rotate at 300 RPM.

Why? a solid state drive doesn't need to rotate.

I am pleased to see that you have followed my suggestion to stop talking about CDs and DVDs.

[Bored chemist]

Nobody looks Smart & Good in the process of making someone else look Bad & Dumb!

Nobody here knows who I am, so there's no real point in me trying to look clever (or dumb, come to think of it).
But I do like to think that I sometimes make the site more correct.

[Zer0]

Nobody looks Smart & Good in the process of making someone else look Bad & Dumb!

Nobody here knows who I am, so there's no real point in me trying to look clever (or dumb, come to think of it).
But I do like to think that I sometimes make the site more correct.

You did not quite get the Reference, Again!

Perhaps I'm wasting my time here.

Ps - What good is Knowledge, if it makes one Rude & Arrogant.

[hamdani yusuf]

I am pleased to see that you have followed my suggestion to stop talking about CDs and DVDs.

I brought the CD as counter example for the assertion in the OP that preserving memory requires sending of electrochemical messages.

If one is dead there are no electrochemical messages being sent around.

Static memories don't need messages being sent around. Think of a CD/DVD.

Technically, reading the data written on a CD doesn't need to rotate it at 300 rpm. You can go as slow as you like.
If cost and practicality are not concerned, we can move the optical head in 2D while the CD is stationary. It's even possible, at least in principle, to read the CD using extremely high resolution photosensor, just like how smartphones read QR codes.
Come to think of it, even solid state drives don't work exactly like how brains work.

[Bored chemist]

You can go as slow as you like.

With one exception; the speed can't be zero.
Unless, of course you turn to  from a serial to a parallel device and have a separate sensor look at each pit on the disk. It would probably be easier to multiplex those sensors in some way. As you say, a way to do this would ab a very high resolution camera.

If you did that, you would have something that looked a lot more like a SS drive.
And it would also look a lot more like the human brain.

that preserving memory requires sending of electrochemical messages.

In the human brain, it does.
If you are looking for an electronic analogy dram looks less bad than sram.

[Zer0]

Pardon me, but This is sounding less & less of Physiology & Medicine...
& More & more off of Technology & Geek Speak!

Ps - Yea, i think i get this one now too.
🙏

[Halc]

In biological brain, it's mostly about connections between neurons.

Possibly, especially in the hippocampus, which is sort of short term memory. The synapses need to be further strengthened by immediate exercise of the pathways. In this manner it would seem that important things might be remembered later on, and unimportant things promptly forgotten.
Long term memory has to work in at least a somewhat different manner, because it needs to be more non-volatile as you put it. Some childhood memory may not have been accessed in decades, yet it is in there, more firmly even than more recent memories, as evidenced by Alzheimer patients who steadily forget their lives in reverse order, with the oldest memories being the last to go.

The connections, or rather the information contained in the strength of those connections, seems to vanish before actual death, as evidenced by memory loss from people revived from oxygen deprivation. This is evidence, but not hard evidence, that memories become irretrievable before death occurs, at least by the subject. Perhaps a hypothetical molecular scan might still find vestiges of the state of those failed connections despite their lack of functionality to the damaged brain. Information in theory cannot be destroyed, so past state can be constructed in principle.
I don't think Heisenberg's uncertainty prevents a scan of a person. You don't much care about momentum or exact quantum state of anything, just sufficiently detailed state at a given moment. And molecular detail is probably an overkill, but a scan down to the cellular level is not enough.

So now you have state of a dead being, complete with probable description of connections that might have been not too long ago. Nobody can read that, so you need to somehow print that state on a brain that's in a different (live) state, sort of like transferring an odometer reading from a crashed car onto a replacement model built with all the wear and tear of the car just before the crash. It's a poor analogy because a car isn't something that can be dead. Only damaged. One presumes that an undamaged biological being would be alive, but nobody has ever built one, however crude.
Also, we're talking death of the system, which is different than cellular death. People are alive in more than one way, and the death of one way is not necessarily the death of the other. Organ transplants would not work if they were biologically dead, despite their being taken from dead people.

[hamdani yusuf]

The connections, or rather the information contained in the strength of those connections, seems to vanish before actual death, as evidenced by memory loss from people revived from oxygen deprivation. This is evidence, but not hard evidence, that memories become irretrievable before death occurs, at least by the subject.

Another way to look at it, is that it's oxygen deprivation, and not death itself, which destroys memory. The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

[hamdani yusuf]

Christof Koch - How does Memory Work?

We all wish for better memories. But how are memories stored? For all our neuroscience, we still do not know even the level in the brain where memories are stored—from inside neurons to long brain circuits. We do know that the synapses between neurons in the brain are critical, but how those chemical changes mean a specific memory remains a mystery.

Interesting finding : One experiment found Jennifer Aniston neuron in a patient.

[hamdani yusuf]

The connections, or rather the information contained in the strength of those connections, seems to vanish before actual death, as evidenced by memory loss from people revived from oxygen deprivation. This is evidence, but not hard evidence, that memories become irretrievable before death occurs, at least by the subject.

Another way to look at it, is that it's oxygen deprivation, and not death itself, which destroys memory. The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

So, the answer to the op comes back to how we define death. If it requires irreversible destruction of  someone's memory, then the answer would be no. In pre-modern societies, it can simply means stoppage of breath or heart beat. Because they simply have no way to reverse those.

[Origin]

If it requires irreversible destruction of  someone's memory, then the answer would be no

There is no definition of death that has anything to do with memories.
The answer to the question is simply when you are dead you are dead, so of course there are no memories.  For instance I do not think Newtons skeleton has memories.
Now if the question is about the existence of 'life after death', like a human soul or something then it is a philosophical or religious question, not a science question.

[Halc]

So, the answer to the op comes back to how we define death.

This definition seems to change over time. It usually means 'non-functional beyond the point of healing', which changes as technology improves to the point of reviving somebody who would previously have been considered dead.

The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

Can you think of one? I mean, doctors are known for saying that actual cause of death is never from heart failure, drowning, cancer, or whatever. It's always lack of oxygen to the brain that finishes you off. This of course isn't strictly true. A grenade going off by your head will surely kill you before the oxygen deprivation even begins, but it isn't going to leave the memories intact.

If it requires irreversible destruction of  someone's memory, then the answer would be no.

But per my prior post, is the destruction irreversable? The guy has lost them, but is it lost to somebody doing a scan? It's not like anybody can look at the scan data (even of a live person) and know what his memories are/were. How might one glean memories from such data, scanned from a person dead enough that they're gone to him.

[Bored chemist]

The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

Simple.
Blow their brains out with a shotgun.
Plenty of access to oxygen.

[hamdani yusuf]

There is no definition of death that has anything to do with memories.

Do you think that memory is a biological function?

Death is the permanent, irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism.[1] Brain death is sometimes used as a legal definition of death.[2] The remains of a previously living organism normally begin to decompose shortly after death. Death is an inevitable, universal process that eventually occurs in all living organisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

[hamdani yusuf]

The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

Simple.
Blow their brains out with a shotgun.
Plenty of access to oxygen.

How would you collect the memory then?

[evan_au]

if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

Someone who is on a heart/lung machine will not suffer oxygen deprivation.
But if their brain is still intact, they are not legally dead.

I think the scanning process is a major problem.
- With current technology, if you could get a "fresh" brain, to make a complete map of the connections between cells (whether that be chemical, mechanical, protein structures, etc) on a scale of a synapse would require infusing it with antifreeze, cryogenically freezing it, and slicing it into extremely thin slices. These could be infused with a suitable stain and scanned into a computer with a microscope, to be reassembled as a digital 3D model.
- With a fantastic extension of current technology, one could image a super-resolution MRI machine that could obtain a non-destructive synapse-level scan of a whole brain. But that won't come soon (as I understand it, this would require an incredibly powerful magnetic field, and lots of processing power)!   

Then that leads to the next problem: how do you interpret this mass of data?

[Bored chemist]

The problem can be resolved if we can find a way to make someone die without causing oxygen deprivation.

Simple.
Blow their brains out with a shotgun.
Plenty of access to oxygen.

How would you collect the memory then?

Do you think the memory would still be there?
Is the memory not a combination of complex structural and chemical aspects?
And, if it is, do you not think that the process of death would also destroy those complex patterns?

[hamdani yusuf]

Can you think of one? I mean, doctors are known for saying that actual cause of death is never from heart failure, drowning, cancer, or whatever. It's always lack of oxygen to the brain that finishes you off.

Is it the lack of oxygen to the brain that finishes you off, or is it the follow up reactions that destroy the molecular configuration of the brains? The frozen experimental hamster had no access to oxygen. Some naturally frozen frogs don't either.

[hamdani yusuf]

Do you think the memory would still be there?
Is the memory not a combination of complex structural and chemical aspects?
And, if it is, do you not think that the process of death would also destroy those complex patterns?

Some chunk of the brain may still intact. But you need to act quickly preserving and reading it before it deteriorates.

[Bored chemist]

Do you think the memory would still be there?
Is the memory not a combination of complex structural and chemical aspects?
And, if it is, do you not think that the process of death would also destroy those complex patterns?

Some chunk of the brain may still intact. But you need to act quickly preserving and reading it before it deteriorates.

I'm not sure that's possible.
The distributed nature of the brain lead me to think that you need essentially all of it to decode any of it.

Both "life" and "memory" are dependent on the proper organisation of the brain's chemistry and structures.
A baby has life, but no memory.
To me that suggests that the requirement for "life" is easier to meet than the requirement for "memory".
If I'm right then it's likely that any disruption to the brain which extinguished "life" would also destroy "memory".