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Some neuroscientists believe it may be possible, within a century or so, for our minds to continue to function after death — in a computer or some other kind of simulation. Others say it’s theoretically impossible, or impossibly far off in the future. A lot of pieces have to fall into place before we can even begin to start thinking about testing the idea. But new high-tech efforts to understand the brain are also generating methods that make those pieces seem, if not exactly imminent, then at least a bit more plausible.
For now, the only way to see all the connections in the three-dimensional maze of wiring hidden in brains is to zoom in on brain tissue with an electron microscope and scan it in extremely thin sheets, one after another, then stitch the scans back together in a computer.
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The advent of new tools has automated this arduous process, which is now relatively reliable and, while still painfully slow, faster than ever before. The most ambitious such project now underway, a scan of an entire mouse connectome, is expected to take about five years using the fastest (and most expensive) electron microscope in the world. At that rate, it would take thousands of years to scan an entire human brain. But one recent paper says that it might be possible to parcel out chunks of brain to many such microscopes working in parallel without compromising the accuracy of the final map.
Read full, original post: The Neuroscience of Immortality
