TRANSPLANTS

Medical science makes great leaps year after year.

One of the greatest successes has been in the area of organ transplants.

From a science fiction standpoint, would it be a great leap to have "mental" transplants.

The idea of reconditioning a person's brain function has been around for centuries. Ancient people bored holes into skulls to let out "evil spirits" who may have been causing seizures or dizziness. Electroshock treatments were used to try to alter the pathological condition of criminals in a means of rehabilitating them.

As a different explanation to the "smart drugs" post, there may be a day in the future where science will allow people to transfer, transpose or overwrite a person's brain and memories and implant new ones.

Brain washing has been used in the spy game. Emotional abuse has been seen to alter people's character and behavior (mostly for the worse). But those techniques and trauma is used to suppress and repress a personality and memories.  If one transplants an entire new persona, with "fake" memories that seem real, does a person believe in his or her new self?

Probably to absolutely.

Reformatting a hard drive is the closest analogy to this theory.

By altering the character's past, one can easily manipulate and control their future.

How many LOST characters could have been brain transplant recipients?  All of them.

As a few viewers remarked during the original run, many characters flashbacks did not line up exactly with the personality matrix of the island world, and clearly not with the sideways world.

Why would someone want to take a character and make a "new" Jack, a "new" Kate, a "new" Locke, etc.?  Because he could. And for some reason, it appears the likely source of that reprogramming is Jacob, who by his "touch" altered the lives of all his candidates and people brought to his island laboratory. Recall, Jacob and MIB's conversations about the humans coming to the island was couched in socio-experimental terms, that in the end no matter who came to the island, they would become corrupted and die. LOST could be seen as a rogue human experiment by attempting to alter a person's brain memories in order to see if the transplant could truly change the person's actions.