When will you be able to upload your brain to a computer ?

[staarker]

It has been a science fiction staple for years, but will we ever get the opportunity to do this for real and if so, when ?
We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units - therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don't actually know how much information the human brain can hold.

Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the neurons (brain cells) comprised in one cubic millimetre of the brain of a mouse - a milestone considered extraordinary.

Within this minuscule cube of brain tissue, the size of a grain of sand, the researchers counted more than 100,000 neurons and more than a billion connections between them. They managed to record the corresponding information on computers, including the shape and configuration of each neuron and connection, which required two petabytes, or two million gigabytes of storage. And to do this, their automated microscopes had to collect 100 million images of 25,000 slices of the minuscule sample continuously over several months.

Now if this is what it takes to store the full physical information of neurons and their connections in one cubic millimetre of mouse brain, you can perhaps imagine that the collection of this information from the human brain is not going to be a walk in the park.

Data extraction and storage, however, is not the only challenge. For a computer to resemble the brain's mode of operation, it would need to access any and all the stored information in a very short amount of time: the information would need to be stored in its random access memory (RAM), rather than on traditional hard disks. But if we tried to store the amount of data the researchers gathered in a computer's RAM, it would occupy 12.5 times the capacity of the largest single-memory computer (a computer that is built around memory, rather than processing) ever built.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons (as many stars as could be counted in the Milky way) - one million times those contained in our cubic millimetre of mouse brain. And the estimated number of connections is a staggering ten to the power of 15. That is ten followed by 15 zeroes - a number comparable to the individual grains contained in a two meter thick layer of sand on a 1km-long beach. https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/n ... a-computer

[FurriesRock]

To take it a little further...

The universe itself, when looked at from a higher viewpoint, looks like the inside of a brain.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/univ ... 24170.html

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-u ... cientists/

[jeremydeth]

It seems like I watched a show about this years ago on the Discovery Channel. But in the episode, they were saying that the way our brains store memories (not like a recorder but like a snap shot), it wouldn't take that much space to download and store it.

[FurriesRock]

It seems like I watched a show about this years ago on the Discovery Channel. But in the episode, they were saying that the way our brains store memories (not like a recorder but like a snap shot), it wouldn't take that much space to download and store it.

Transcendence with Johnny Depp is a good film to watch about this subject.

One concept from the film is that a computer that thinks it's a human being will not act, in a moral sense, like a human being, and it will lead to catastrophe.

[ricky1874]

It seems like I watched a show about this years ago on the Discovery Channel. But in the episode, they were saying that the way our brains store memories (not like a recorder but like a snap shot), it wouldn't take that much space to download and store it.

I also remember seeing a tv program about this some time ago. I really hope they hurry up and perfect this process before I get too old to volunteer haha. I would love to volunteer to try it out... but then that would been when I'm old and don't have much to loose haha.