In medical school, while dissecting human brains, Gessner came to understand that all those personal attributes that made us who we are—our hopes, fears, dreams, memories—were nothing but chemical compounds held in suspension by electrical charges in our brains. When a person died, the brain’s power source was severed, and all of those chemicals simply dissolved into a meaningless puddle of liquid, erasing every last trace of who that person had once been. When you die, you die. Full stop.
