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Though I find it hard to relate to, many people consider their bodies to be essential to their identity — they wouldn't be them without it. These people find our intuition about what is essential similarly foreign.

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Some people have body dysmorphia issues, and some people just really identify with looking a specific way. I understand that. However, some people really identify with living in a specific location, too, but we don't usually regard moving day as the death date of the person who moved.

To be fair, AFAIK we don't really know how much the rest of the nervous system is "attuned" to being connected to a specific brain and vice versa. That is, even if the brainstem could be 100% connected to the spinal cord, we don't know how hard it would be to adapt to the new body. Could it result in something resembling the alien hand syndrome [1] or body integrity identity disorder [2], for instance?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorde...

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