NEUROLOGICAL CARTOGRAPHY

There is a scientific project underway to map and study the human brain's complex system of interconnected communication pathways, or “circuitry”. This ambitious endeavor is called the Human Connectome Project. Multiple imaging technologies will be employed over the course of five years to get a detailed three-dimensional perspective on our most complicated organ. Just how detailed? A million neurons would comprise the smallest unit of 3D detail, a voxel.

So we are still far from noninvasively imaging the individual neurons, but this project is about larger scale communication. As the data is shared throughout the scientific community, we should get some conceptual breakthroughs in the coming years. The better we understand the brain, the better we can help victims of neurological diseases.

Back to individual neurons. Imagine the future prospect of imaging technology that could see such detail, plus synapses. If we could make a 3D model of the brain that detailed, then it is only a matter of time (a long time) before simulation occurs. Run a computer simulation of a brain, and you have a limitless resource for neurological experiments. If you provide sensory information for the simulation, then the result would be artificial intelligence, right? The possibilities are astounding. What if you could take a snapshot of your brain? The arrangement of your neurons and their connections, the synapses, plays a significant role in your personality and thought processes. Comparing such snapshots could reveal amazing insights into how we think. With a sufficiently sophisticated simulation, such a snapshot could be turned into something of an intelligence clone. Forget programming computers. Maybe far in the future you could just get your brain scanned, and upload the data into a computer. The computer runs a simulation based on the data, thereby becoming artificially intelligent! The virtual brain just needs high-tech sensors and some way of interacting with the physical world. Perhaps not even that. You could create a virtual reality for the simulated brain with which to interact.

This prospect creates some intriguing scenarios. First, people's personalities can be immortal. After you die, a computer can continue thinking just like you for the lifetime of its software. Second, there might emerge a race of inorganic people. Their “lives” are not limited by physical bodies. A robot body can be more easily maintained than a biological body. Also, if they get bored with their bodies, then they can just download themselves into other bodies. Another scenario involves a change in perspective. What would be your first reaction if you found out that you were a computer simulation? Those memories, your personality, your emotions, they are just copies of those belonging to some organic life form. You are trapped in an inorganic, virtual world controlled by the guy at the keyboard. That's what it might be like for the computer simulation.