It’s interesting that The New York Times published an article about brain cryonics, immortality, connectomics, trans-humanism, and uploading. Kim Suozzi, who died of cancer at age 23, chose to have her brain preserved in hope to get alive sometime in future. One of the options is to scan the brain and map the connections between individual neurons.

“I can see within, say, 40 years that we would have a method to generate a digital replica of a person’s mind,” said Winfried Denk, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, who has invented one of several mapping techniques.”

“The mapping technique pioneered by Dr. Denk and others involves scanning brains in impossibly thin sheets with an electron microscope. Stacked together on a computer, the scans reveal a three-dimensional map of the connections between each neuron in the tissue, the critical brain anatomy known as the connectome.”

The author doesn’t dive into details of reconstructing a map of neuron connections, though. As Yan LeCunn points out, “connectomics efforts use 3D convolutional nets to analyze the volumetric brain images and to reconstruct the neural circuits.”

As strange as it may sound, neuroscientists use artificial neural networks to reconstruct models of human neural networks. Yet another good use of deep learning techniques.