In Altered Carbon, the body no longer matters. As one character quipped: “You shed it like a snake sheds its skin.” That’s because the human consciousness has been digitized, and can be moved between bodies—both real and synthetic.
Generally, if scientists want to see how a living thing functions in high resolution, they need to slice it into tiny pieces first. Now, there’s scientists a powerful and bizarre new tool in researchers’ arsenal.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about using supercomputers to simulate the human brain. But as scientists get progressively closer to achieving this goal, they’re going to have to consider the ethics involved. By making minds that live inside machines, we run the risk of inflicting serious harm.
It looks like something someone created with a spirograph, but it's called a connectogram, and it's increasingly being used by neuroscientists to map and interpret the complex connections of white matter fiber buried deep inside the human brain.
