Sporns is in a good position to judge. He and his colleagues have carried out just about the closest thing to whole-brain emulation that scientists can manage in the early twenty-first century. They use a high-resolution method called diffusion spectrum imaging to map the long fibers that link regions of the brain together. Sporns and his colleagues have analyzed the connections between 1,000 regions and have found the brain's network is organized according to some of the same rules of other large networks—including the Internet. For example, several regions act as hubs, while most regions are connected to only a few others.
In 2009, Sporns and his colleagues created a computer model of this brain network and let each region produce signals that could spread down the fibers. They found their simulation of a brain at rest produced distinctive waves that spread back and forth around the entire brain similar to the way waves spread across our own.
Whole-brain emulations will become more sophisticated in the future, Sporns told me, but he found it ridiculous to expect them to be able to capture an individual's mind. In fact, mind uploading is a distraction from the truly revolutionary impact whole-brain emulations will have. By experimenting with them, researchers may discover some of the laws for building thinking networks. It may turn out human brains can only work if their networks have certain arrangements. "It's like learning the laws of physics when you want to build an airplane. It helps," said Sporns.
Discovering those laws may allow computer scientists to finally build machines that have mental processes similar to ours. Sporns thinks scientists are already moving in that direction. In 2009, for example, iBm won a contract with the military to "fabricate a multichip neural system of about 108 neurons and instantiate into a robotic platform performing at 'cat' level."
"That is going to happen," said Sporns. This is the best I can manage for skeptics. Uploading your mind is science fiction. But endowing robots with a humanlike cognition? Only a matter of time.
-Carl Zimmer's fasicnating column here
"When I asked these skeptics about the future, even their most conservative visions were unsettling: a future in which people boost their brains with enhancing drugs, for example, or have sophisticated computers implanted in their skulls for life. While we may never be able to upload our minds into a computer, we may still be able to build computers based on the layout of the human brain. I can report I have not drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid, but I have taken a sip."
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