Harvard scientists have embarked upon an ambitious program to create a circuit diagram of the human brain, with the help of new machines that automatically turn brain tissue into high-resolution neural maps. By mapping every synapse in the brain, researchers hope to create a "connectome" -- a diagram that would elucidate the brain's activity at a level of detail far outstripping today's most advanced brain-monitoring tools like fMRI. "You're going to see things you didn't expect," said Jeff Lichtman, a Harvard professor of molecular and cellular biology. "It gives us an opportunity to witness this vast complicated universe that has been largely inaccessible until now." The effort is part of a new field of scientific research called connectomics. The field is so new that the first course ever taught on it recently ended at MIT. It is to neuroscience what genomics is to genetics. Where genetics looks at individual genes or groups of genes, genomics looks at the entire genetic complement of an organism. Connectomics makes a similar jump in scale and ambition, from studying individual cells to studying swaths of the brain containing millions of cells. A full set of images of the human brain at synapse-level resolution would contain hundreds of petabytes of information, or about the total amount of storage in Google's data centers, Lichtman estimates. Machine Peels Brain, So Scientists Can Map Synapses It slices, it dices and it heralds the arrival of a new era of neuroscience that focuses on industrializing the process of mapping the brain. It's a neuroscience gadget called the automatic tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome (ATLUM), and the name says it all.

An ultramicrotome is a piece of laboratory equipment that cuts samples of flesh into very thin slices. The lathe allows the machine to cut continuously, which makes the process faster. Already, the prototype has collected more than a hundred half-centimeter-long sections of mouse brain. Once the slices have been stuck onto a piece of transparent tape, the scientists use a scanning electron microscope to actually image the cells.

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If you have a map/diagram of the brain, you might be able to implement a functioning brain as software. Thus we're a bit closer to the science fiction idea of storing a copy (or several) of yourself on disk.

Personally, I don't think that sounds very appealing, but even if someone does think so, it's worth pointing out that you won't be doing it to yourself; you'll be doing it to somebody else. The virtual person might be a more or less exact copy of the original, but he will be a different entity. Nor can he be said to have chosen his fate: no matter how exact a replica of the original, the copy doesn't make the decision to become a computer copy (he doesn't even exist at the time of the decision).

In fact, by making a copy of yourself, you're making someone exist who otherwise wouldn't have existed. Since existence can't be better, but can be worse, than non-existence, that's certainly not a self-evident right. (And yes, darn it, that goes for having children as well.)

now this is something I'm really looking forward to...

The brain is the greatest computer known to man, in nature and technology. It still is at least a century before ones self, considering the amount of data, could be stored anywere except on ten thousand 500 GB harddrives in this day and age.

Wonder if we would be able to engineer biological computers. Containing brain matter cloned in some way and attached to a computer but being kept alive in solution of fluid that could feed oxygen and other nutrients to the brain.

That might solve the problem we have with the current computers when circuits cannot be build smaller.

What a cool topic. I wish they could disconnect the part of the brain that craves chocolate l:P

What a cool topic. I wish they could disconnect the part of the brain that craves chocolate