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Will You Ever Be Able To Upload Your Brain?

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: October 12th, 2015, 12:00am UTC

An anonymous reader points out this piece in the Times by professor of neuroscience at Columbia and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Kenneth Miller, about what it would take to upload a human brain. "Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or 'connectome,' of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First, we are far from constructing a connectome. The current best achievement was determining the connections in a tiny piece of brain tissue containing 1,700 synapses; the human brain has more than a hundred billion times that number of synapses. While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)"pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Will+You+Ever+Be+Able+To+Upload+Your+Brain%3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1WVMr0W"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F10%2F11%2F2134244%2Fwill-you-ever-be-able-to-upload-your-brain%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/11/2134244/will-you-ever-be-able-to-upload-your-brain?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/11/2134244/will-you-ever-be-able-to-upload-your-brain?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/zoJC5MWTr_Q" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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