IT WILL be possible some day to physically recover the memory of dead people and to look for the hardwiring for diseases and addictions, the TEDGlobal conference heard yesterday.
Prof Sebastian Seung from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said figuring out the connectome in a human brain would be work that took generations to do but it was doable.
He said everything our brain does involves the interaction of neurons and synapses, and neuroactivity causes a brain to change over time. “Your memories and your personality may be encoded in the connections between your neurons; that is your connectome. You are your connectome.”
Prof Seung is a world leader in connectomics, the idea that you can map out all the connections in the human brain. It is an emerging science.
To date the only connectome which has been fully isolated belongs to a tiny worm called a c.elegans. It had only 300 neurons and 7,000 synapses, but the work took 12 years.
Prof Seung said the human brain was “awesome in its complexity” by comparison, and scientists were capable of discovering the connectome of only a tiny portion of our brains. However, he was confident the technology would eventually be available to create the connectome for a whole human brain.
“Some day a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database. Some day artificial intelligence will analyse the images without human intelligence and summarise them into a connectome.”
Prof Seung said it was an idea worth taking seriously however implausible some people thought it was. People often spoke casually about brains which were hardwired for anorexia or some other disease. If that was the case it ought to be possible to identify that flaw.
He said the theory of memory dating back to the 19th century is that recalling something causes a certain pattern of synaptic connection in the brain to occur like a chain of dominos.
In time it ought to be possible to find the connectome of a cryogenetically frozen people and recover their memories providing the brain was intact. However, such an endeavour was something that can only be for the “far future”.