After the Human Genome Project (mapping the human genome) comes the Human Connectome Project (mapping every neuronal connection in a brain)

Digitizing the brain:"we will be able to scan, map, + store the data on every neuronal connection in a person’s head" http://t.co/UpWQbZzlyH
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 27, 2013

"The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do." The death of brain death?... "Only a few months ago, the British physicist Stephen Hawking speculated that a computer-simulated afterlife might become technologically feasible."

The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do http://t.co/no1kQ50DgA
— Aeon Magazine (@aeonmag) December 23, 2013

Mapping the human genome - Mapping the human brain

"In some ways, the scientific problem of understanding the human brain is similar to the problem of human genetics. If you want to understand the human genome properly, an engineer might start with the basic building blocks of DNA and construct an animal, one base pair at a time, until she has created something human-like. But given the massive complexity of the human genome — more than 3 billion base pairs — that approach would be prohibitively difficult at the present time. Another approach would be to read the genome that we already have in real people. It is a lot easier to copy something complicated than to re-engineer it from scratch. The human genome project of the 1990s accomplished that, and even though nobody really understands it very well, at least we have a lot of copies of it on file to study.

The same strategy might be useful on the human brain. Instead of trying to wire up an artificial brain from first principles, or training a neural network over some absurdly long period until it becomes human-like, why not copy the wiring already present in a real brain? In 2005, two scientists, Olaf Sporns, professor of brain sciences at Indiana University, and Patric Hagmann, neuroscientist at the University of Lausanne, independently coined the term ‘connectome’ to refer to a map or wiring diagram of every neuronal connection in a brain. By analogy to the human genome, which contains all the information necessary to grow a human being, the human connectome in theory contains all the information necessary to wire up a functioning human brain. If the basic premise of neural network modelling is correct, then the essence of a human mind is contained in its pattern of connectivity. Your connectome, simulated in a computer, would recreate your conscious mind."

@EricTopol After the Human Genome Project (mapping the human genome) comes the Human Connectome Project (mapping every neuronal cx in brain)
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) December 27, 2013