Brain Transplant

A mind is a terrible thing to cut-and-paste.

Kind of an older trope, now largely superseded by Brain Uploading. A Brain Transplant is what happens when a Mad Scientist saws open your skull, removes your brain, and puts it in someone else's body. The details, such as how the transplanted brain interfaces with the new body's nervous system, or how immune rejection is bypassed, tend to be Hand Waved. Experiments and theoretical ways of actually performing this in Real Life have been conducted and proposed; however, we don't yet have the technology to connect a brain from one person to the spinal cord of another, so at best this would result in an "And I Must Scream" situation.

Often involves a Brain in a Jar at some point. If successfully pulled off on two living people, a "Freaky Friday" Flip will result. Whole-body Organ Theft may also become a factor, if the donor body isn't yet deceased or brain-dead. A common aspect of a Frankenstein's Monster.

Also see Grand Theft Me.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Black Jack, being a series that applies Toon Physics to the Medical Drama genre, unsurprisingly has this on occasion.
  • In one notable case, Black Jack gives an artist who had been painting landscapes on an island during an H-bomb test a new body to save him from radiation poisoning. He dies anyway from brain cancer, but not before completing one last painting.
  • Another chapter has a horse's brain put in a man's body to incriminate his owner's killer.
  • Pinoko, Black Jack's surrogate daughter, starts off as a parasitic tumor/cyst on her twin sister. Jack has her brain and other organs (that are independent of her twin) transplanted into an artificial body.
• Brain Transplants in general are quite common in all Ghost in the Shell works, often from one artificial body to another.
  • In the first movie, the Major muses that she has no real way of knowing if she even has a brain in her current body.
  • In the first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a politician attempted to swap his cyberbrain (a brain enclosed in cybernetics, as common as cell phones) into a waitress gynoid, but a foreign agent instead put his own brain in the politician's body and tried to smuggle the politician's brain out of the country in a suitcase. And they did that all in a restaurant men's room.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Kenjaku (a.k.a. Noritoshi Kamo or Suguru Geto) has Body Surfed through a millennia's worth of hosts by tearing their brains out and replacing it with his own. That's why "Geto" in the present has a stitch in his forehead. Disturbingly, he can casually pop his skull open to show his brain has its own mouth, suggesting it's some sort of Brain Monster Puppeteer Parasite.

Comic Books

• In the Bad Company series by 2000 AD, Kano was taken prisoner by the alien Krool and subjected to a horrifying experiment: Half of his brain was switched with one from a Krool, and he went nearly insane until he met Mad Tommy and they founded Bad Company.
• Batman villain Gorilla Boss was created when mobster George "The Boss" Dyke had his brain transplanted into the body of a gorilla following his execution in the gas chamber.
• Doom Patrol:
  • Robotman's origin was that he was a racecar driver named Cliff Steele who survived a severe accident when the Chief put his brain into a robot body (an origin that was later retconned so that the Chief caused the accident in question in the first place). The "Titans Around the World" arc of Geoff Johns' Teen Titans run would also reveal that the Brain was originally intended to be the brain to be put into the Robotman body before Monsieur Mallah rescued the Brain from the Chief's lab and the Chief subsequently made do with Cliff Steele.
  • Grunt, a member of the team introduced in John Byrne's run through the "Tenth Circle" arc of JLA (1997) that served as a Poorly Disguised Pilot, is revealed in the series' tenth issue to be a teenage boy named Henry Bucher who became what he is now when a Mad Scientist surgically transplanted his brain into the skull of a four-armed gorilla.
• At the end of the Judge Dredd story "America", the narrator Bennet Beeny witnesses his soulmate America Jara be gunned down by the Judges in a failed terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty. After America is declared braindead, Beeny has his brain placed in America's body so they can still be together. In a later story, Beeny's new body begins to shut down because it's rejecting the implant.
• Nero: In the classic story Het Rattenkasteel (The Rat Castle) Nero and Detective Van Zwam enter a haunted castle where they are held captive in a dungeon by a Mad Scientist named Dr. Ratsjenko who plans to transplant their brains into those of rats to make rats even smarter. This is also shown in a very macabre Imagine Spot where Nero imagines Ratsjenko cutting open his head and removing the brain. He fails to do so with them, but later he does manage to steal a brain from a university laboratory and put it in a rat, who makes his rat compatriots rise to lead a rebellion against the humans.
• Superman:
  • The Ultra-Humanite, the first supervillain who Superman faced (in fact, the first supervillain ever in a DC Comics story), is a Mad Scientist who is seemingly killed in a battle against the Man of Steel. However, he has his henchman briefly revive him so that he can implant his brain into the body of actress Dolores Winters and continue his schemes. He transplants his brain into many different bodies over the years, including various superheroes when he has the opportunity, before settling on an albino gorilla.
  • Lex Luthor II, the Australian son of Lex Luthor in the nineties, eventually turns out to be Lex Luthor I's brain in a cloned body with better hair. Then, after Clone Degeneration and a Deal with the Devil, he returns as Lex Luthor I and successfully claims that the clone had nothing to do with him.
• The French comic Une Femme Dans la peau or Johanna uses this as a plot point, but plays more as a Gender Bender story. Long story short, a middle-aged, lecherous businessman ends up hit by a bus the same day a beautiful blond twenty-something ODs. Both corpses are acquired by an elderly Nazi scientist and used as the first test of an experimental brain-swapping procedure. It works... but the scientist gets fried for his trouble. Now the businessman has to deal with being a blonde bombshell, starting his/her life over, and having to dodge the scientist's elderly Nazi remnant chums and stop them from using the procedure in a two-for-one Fountain of Youth/world domination plot.
• Wonder Woman: While Golden Age Giganta was the result of a Killer Gorilla going through an Devolution Device, her later iterations are the result of Dr. Zeul's mind being transferred, at least temporarily as an emergency measure, into one.

Films — Animation

• Referenced in Toy Story: while Sid swaps the heads of his sister's doll and a toy pterodactyl, he role-plays like he's a surgeon performing a dangerous "double-bypass brain transplant".
  Buzz Lightyear: I don't think that man's ever been to medical school.

Films — Live-Action

• ABCs of Death 2: "Q is for Questionnaire" ends with the man's brain being put into the body of a gorilla.
• The Atomic Brain deals with an old rich woman who seeks to cheat death by having her brain put into the body of a young, healthy woman. The scientist in charge of doing this does a number of tests on dead bodies, which makes them mindless bodies, but doing so with live bodies works wonders. The woman's plan gets derailed due to her initial choice getting mauled, her companion attempting to betray her, and the scientist putting her in a cat's body.
• In The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a young, mad scientist's girlfriend is beheaded in a car accident. He takes her head back to his lab and keeps it alive with his mad science. Then he searches for another girl who won't be missed, so he can chop her head off and transplant his girlfriend's head on.
• In Criminal (2016), recently deceased CIA agent Bill Pope has his memories grafted into the mind of violent convict Jericho Stewart in order for him to complete the dead agent's assignment for the CIA.
• This has been a staple of Frankenstein films ever since the 1931 film, in which the monster receives the brain of a violent criminal.
  • In The Ghost of Frankenstein, Ygor makes Dr. Frankenstein transplant his (Ygor's) brain into the monster's body so they'll be "together forever." Unfortunately, they don't have the same blood type, so the Ygor-Monster is blind, leading to the eyes closed/arms outstretched shuffle that the Monster is commonly Flanderized into having.
  • In Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Dracula's plan involves transplanting Costello's brain into the monster.
  • In Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Maria Frankenstein transplants her grandfather's artificial brain into Hank's body.
  • In Lady Frankenstein, Tanya uses her father's techniques to transplant the brain of her aging lover Charles into the body of the physically perfect but mentally defective stable hand Thomas.
  • Played for laughs in Young Frankenstein. The monster is supposed to receive the brain of a supersmart person but Igor drops the jar and secretly replaces the brain with one that is marked abnormal. The actual brain transplant is executed in an Offscreen Moment of Awesome. When the monster awakes, of course it turns out to be a moron.
  • Monster Mash (1995) has Dr. Frankenstein scheme to put Scott's brain into the body of his monster.
  • In Sharkenstein, Klaus has Coop, Madge, and Skip assist him in transplanting the brain and heart of Frankenstein's Monster into Sharkenstein after he takes the latter's brain out.
• In Get Out (2017), a community of middle-aged-to-elderly white people kidnap young, healthy black people for this purpose, allowing them to effectively live forever and appropriate the "coolness" that black Americans are perceived to have.
• At the end of The Man with Two Brains, Dr. Hfuhruhurr, inventor of "cranial screw-top brain surgery", transplants the Brain in a Jar he's been dating into the body of his evil wife.
• In The Monster And The Girl, a mild-mannered church organist, wrongfully convicted of murder, agrees to let a local scientist use his remains for medical research. He ends up with his brain transplanted into the body of a gorilla, and uses his new strength to get revenge on the mobsters who framed him and kidnapped his sister.

Literature

• The Airhead trilogy kicks off when frumpy nerd protagonist Emerson, after suffering fatal wounds when a TV falls on her at the grand opening of a department store, wakes up with her brain having been secretly transplanted into the body of a teen supermodel who had a contract with the large corporation that owns the store, and by coincidence was felled by an undetected congenital brain defect at the same time as Emerson was struck by the TV. Em not only discovers that the corporation has been running a secret transplantation program for the ultra-rich, but she's forced to pose as the supermodel as if nothing has changed (including Faking Amnesia) or else.
• In the Discworld novels, this is the ultimate expression of The Igors' philosophy that "What cometh around goeth around". When an Igor dies, his relatives, in addition to sharing his body parts out to whoever needs them, preserve the brain. Eventually, someone will suffer brain death but have a body in good condition, and Igor will be back on someone's feet.
• Empire from the Ashes: In the first book, Big Bad Anu and the various awake members of his faction of mutineers have been using this method to stay immortal. Lower-ranking mutineers have to use the bodies of ordinary Earth-born humans, but Anu and his inner circle only take Imperial bodies, from the thousands of mutineers still in stasis. During the raid on Anu's enclave, after the death of his second-in-command Inanna, Geb, a member of the northern faction, is horrified to realize that the last body Inanna had taken was that of the wife of Horus, the leader of the northerners, who thought she'd been killed during the mutiny on Dahak. Geb vapourizes the body and asks Colin to put a lock on images of Inanna for the century she'd been inhabiting Tanisis' body to spare Horus the heartbreak.
• In Fountain Society, a dying scientist's brain is transplanted into a body of a younger man. He eventually rebels against the eponymous society, and destroys their skyscraper by crashing a plane on it while the Big Bad is going through the same operation.
• In I Will Fear No Evil, the protagonist has his brain transplanted into a woman's body; it doesn't end well. The event is later mentioned in another Robert A. Heinlein novel, Time Enough for Love, when the possibility of being transferred into an Opposite-Sex Clone is suggested to Lazarus Long, who rejects it.
• In the John Carter of Mars story The Master Mind of Mars, the bulk of Ras Thavas' research involves swapping people's brains. He's even made a business out of it, transplanting the brains of the old and wealthy and/or powerful into younger bodies.
• In "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie", a pair of scientists discover an Elasmosaur living in a lake in the Wyoming mountains, soon after the beast is killed and one of the men dies, the other decides to transplant the brain of his companion into the body of the creature.
• In SI (link), the protagonist is awakened from cryonic suspension, and suffers severe ethylene glycol poisoning. Fortunately, there happens to be a body nearby that lacks a central nervous system.
• Star Wars Legends: Expanding on a Brain in a Jar attached to a spider robot and seen in background shots of Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, Legends establishes that the palace was originally a monastary built by the B'omarr monks, who stubbornly remained even as much of the building was taken over by Jabba and his operations. Monks of the B'omarr order have their brains removed and placed into life-support jars upon reaching enlightenment so they can continue to contemplate the universe without being distracted by bodily needs and sensations. When they need to travel and act the brains are installed into modified spider droids. Less scrupulous B'omarr initiates have been known to perform the operation on unwilling patients and even reverse it, implanting brains into other bodies.
  • In Galaxy of Fear Jabba has a racket going on in which he'll turn over comatose criminals for the bounty, having had a monk remove the criminal's brain, and then implant it into someone else's body, giving his 'friends' a whole new identity. After the young Arrandas free a prisoner who'd been slated to host a surrendered killer's brain, Jabba has a serial killer's brain put into Tash's body. The monk puts Tash's brain in a spider droid. The serial killer, as a grown man, is very displeased to find himself in the body of a tween girl and tries to find a substitute. Tash's family eventually manages to get her switched back and the serial killer's brain is confined to a jar not attached to a droid.
  • Tales from Jabba's Palace has the monks revolt after Jabba is killed, taking back their monastery and forcing the operation on many surviving members of Jabba's court. Some are even completely fine with their fate. They are at least assigned to spider droids, since as non-monks they find sensory deprivation horrifying. Bib Fortuna even starts to figure out how to hold a spoon and use a computer, plotting a way to escape his fate.
    • X-Wing Rogue Squadron has Bib contact another Twi'lek who takes him from the monastery and abuses him in the process of trying to find out about Jabba's hidden caches of treasure. Bib turns the tables by 'rescuing' him after a run in with Rogue Squadron, dragging him to a droid-run medical facility. The droids, following the directions of what they imagine is a loyal servant droid, treat his injuries, perform a brain transplant, and install a restraining bolt on the spider droid. Bib rises in his new body and gloats, planning his comeback.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, Jackson's Whole infamously hosts life extension clinics based on brain transplants into younger clones. The clone's brain is thrown away.
• In "The Whisperer in Darkness", the Mi-Go have a tendency to put brains in jars and at least claim they can easily put them back in bodies, not necessarily their original ones.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Brain of Morbius", Brain in a Jar Morbius intends to have himself transplanted into the Doctor's head.
  • In "The Return of Doctor Mysterio", the aliens have their brains transplanted into human hosts by a team of scary surgeons.
• Soap Within a Show example: In Friends, this is how Joey's character on Days of Our Lives "returns"; the brain of another character gets transplanted into his body. At some point, they start ignoring this and he's just Dr Drake Ramoray again.
• In Kamen Rider Gaim, Ryoma Sengoku at one point transplants his brain into Hakaider's robot body, fights against Gaim and Kikaider, and then transplants his brain back to his own body with no apparent lasting effects.
• In the Metal Hurlant Chronicles episode "Long Live the King", the winner of the succession tournament has the dying king's brain transplanted into his skull. Presumably his brain was thrown out.
• Mouse (2021): Seo-joon transplants part of Yo-han's brain into Ba-reum's skull. He previously experimented with transplanting mice's brains. None of the mice survived, and neither does Ba-reum.
• The Mr. Potato Head Show: In the episode "Royal Pain", Dr. Fruitcake rebuilds his creation, Hammy the Ham Monster (who was destroyed by Baloney in the episode "Aliens Dig Baloney"). To ensure that Hammy is tamer this time around, Dr. Fruitcake has given him the brain of a two-year old child.
  Baloney: Now, where did you get the brain of a two-year-old?
  Dr. Fruitcake: Trust me, Baloney, you don't want to know.
• Out of Jimmy's Head has this happen to the eponymous character, using the brain of a Mr. Alt Disney. However, the retention of the "personality gland" lets Jimmy keep everything that's himself.
• Happens in a Halloween Episode of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, complete with a Mad Scientist character, who switches Pete's brain with Ashley's brain and Berg's brain with Sharon's brain and the only one who can help them is Johnny.
• In the Wonder Woman (1975) episode "Gault's Brain", the titular Brain in a Jar plans to steal the body of an athletic young man.

Newspaper Comics

• One comic from The Far Side depicts a brain transplant between a human and a duck. The duck, who can now speak English, goes on to become the leader of a great flock; the human, who now only quacks, just wanders south.

Radio

• In The Ricky Gervais Show, this is a key plot point in Karl Pilkington's idea for a movie.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer: Ghoritch was once a Norse berserker before falling into the clutches of the mad surgeon Throt the Unclean, who transplanted his brain into the body of a heavily modified cyborg Rat Ogre.
• Warhammer 40,000: One of the reasons why ork paindoks are feared is that they occasionally replace a patient's brain with that of a squig, leaving them comatose while they adapt, then leaving them semi-functional zombies only fit to follow the dok's orders.

Video Games

• Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny: Following his intense beating at the hands of Overlord Ivar, Sage Misual finds himself wandering into a Netherworld where the dead roam. This is where he meets the zombie siblings Zed and Bieko, the latter of whom manages to transplant Misual's brain into that of a zombified dog, creating Cerberus.
• Psychonauts 2 has a character whose brain was stolen used as a temporary body for a character who had been reduced to a Brain in a Jar after losing his body years ago. As it turns out, that body is of the Big Bad and his brain was not stolen — he had it transplanted into the leader of the Psychonauts to act as The Mole, making him another example.
• The Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse episode They Stole Max's Brain has Sam put the preserved brain of the child-pharaoh Sammun-Mak in Max's emptied head so someone can move it while he looks for the original. Then Sammun-Mak turns traitor once he gets his hands on the Toys of Power, keeping Max's body until his brain is forcefully removed by the Molemen.
• In Space Station 13, brains house the player's presence. Therefore, if a player's intact brain is surgically transplanted into another body (acquired from a different player or cloned wholesale), that player will be in control of the new body. This is one of the many common methods of bringing a deceased player Back from the Dead.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 has a brain surgery mission in which the entire brain is removed and a new brain is roughly placed in the same place.

Webcomics

• Narbonic:
  • After Dave's first death, Helen reanimates him, but after some shenanigans involving Madblood using his brain in an alcohol solution (drunk robot — bad idea...) for a Wetware CPU, she eventually clones a new body for him and transplants the brain into it.
  • In the Costumer Sunday strip, there's quite a lot of brains changing bodies, some of them cross-species (Venusian to human, and also human to Venusian).

Western Animation

• In the opening sequence of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Night of the Huntress", Solomon Grundy has kidnapped a scientist and ordered his henchmen to transplant the captive's brain into his head because he wants "a bigger brain". Presumably, this makes sense to the not-too-bright Grundy, and the henchmen don't dare contradict him.
• In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Dexter's Assistant", Dexter puts Albert Einstein's brain in Dee Dee's head to make her smarter. Bizarrely, this makes her a genius without changing her memories or identity.
• I Am Weasel: In "I, Architect", an accident results in both Weasel and Baboon having their skulls cracked open and their brains falling out. Because Weasel's brain is so massive and Baboon's is so tiny, the surgeons place the smaller brain into Weasel's smaller head and the large brain into Baboon's larger head. As a result, Baboon (in Weasel's body) starts making all sorts of chaotic changes to the city, whereas Weasel (in Baboon's body) has to move up from the bottom of society in order to stop Baboon's nonsense.
• In the Inside Job (2021) episode "Sex Machina", Andre attempts a Face/Off-style face transplant on the generically attractive Brett and hideous dolphin-man Glenn so they can settle a bet. When that doesn't work out, he puts their faces back and performs a brain transplant instead.
• Kim Possible: In one episode, Ron dreams that he is on work experience at a hospital, when Kim is brought in from a mission. Ron goes to the ward where Kim is taken where he and the other doctors see that she has caught a disease that has paralyzed her into making do a really goofy smile on her face. It is discovered that to cure Kim of the disease, she must be given someone else's brain, so one of the doctors unscrews his own skull and volunteers his brain for transplant. All of a sudden, everyone else in the room (except for Ron) catches the disease, so Ron has to take the brain from the doctor, who voluntarily offers it up, and insert into Kim's head. Despite having someone else's brain, she acts as if she was the same as before.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Patrick SmartPants", the top of Patrick's head gets broken off, and when it is reattached, he becomes a genius. He eventually decides that he prefers being stupid, and while investigating why he became smarter, he discovers that he had actually replaced the top of his head with a similar-looking piece of brain coral, thus giving him a new brain.

Real Life

• Believe it or not, this actually HAS been attempted a few times in real life. Of course, it doesn't involve actually removing the brain, but transplanting a living beings entire head to another body. Largely most tests have been conducted on animals; while they can be revived, they usually only live for a short few moments afterwards, and the expressions on their faces usually don't paint a pleasant picture. Needless to say, the ethics surrounding it have shut down experimentation of this on animals after 60s; though experiments with mice are still being conducted.
  • A few human volunteers have popped up in history, usually those suffering from terminal illness where this is legitimately their only potential hope of living on. However, they have never actually gone through with the procedure. Either it has been blocked by the Government for ethics reasons due to it's high probability of it going horribly wrong and resulting in the patients death, or the patient themselves ultimately backing out before it happens. As of adding this example, no successful human head transplant has ever been recorded.

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