An international research team has produced the first-ever ultra-high resolution 3D digital reconstruction of a complete human brain. At the astonishingly low resolution of 20-microns, the new scans are providing an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the mind.
And remarkably, it could also be seen as a precursor to brain preservation and mind uploading. But more on that in just a bit. First, the breakthrough.
It’s called BigBrain, and it’s a part of the $1.6 billion European Human Brain Project that's seeking to simulate the human brain on a supercomputer. Over the course of the next ten years, HBP researchers will work to understand and map the network of over a hundred billion neuronal connections that elicit emotions, volitional thought, and even consciousness itself. And to do so, the researchers will be using a progressively scaled-up multilayered simulation running on a supercomputer.
But to get there, the researchers are going to have to peer deep inside the human brain. Hence the BigBrain project.
The Map is Not the Territory
There is a risk, however, of overstating the importance of this breakthrough.
As it has often been said, anatomy is not explanation. Just because we have a remarkably fine map of the human brain doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to understand it. No doubt, it will certainly help. But neuroscientists will still need to confer with cognitive scientists and other specialists if we ever hope to gain a full understanding of the human mind.
The researchers are also unduly optimistic when it comes to their timelines. They plan to simulate the entire human brain — from the molecular level to the interaction of entire brain regions — on a supercomputer in ten years. I think that’s highly unlikely. But they are on the right track by developing these sorts of techniques.