Uploading the human mind: what is possible?

The need to simulate all the human senses accurately in a computer environment is still preventing uploading of the human brain - for now.

- By Dobromir Rahnev

The concept, cool yet maybe a little creepy, is known as mind uploading.

Think of it as a way to create a copy of your brain, a transmission of your mind and consciousness into a computer. There you would live digitally, perhaps forever. You'd have an awareness of yourself, you'd retain your memories and still feel like you. But you wouldn't have a body.

Within that simulated environment, you could do anything you do in real life — eating, driving a car, playing sports.

You could also do things impossible in the real world, like walking through walls, flying like a bird or travelling to other planets. The only limit is what science can realistically simulate.

Doable? Theoretically, mind uploading should be possible. Still, you may wonder how it could happen. After all, researchers have barely begun to understand the brain.

Yet science has a track record of turning theoretical possibilities into reality. Just because a concept seems terribly, unimaginably difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Consider that science took humankind to the moon, sequenced the human genome and eradicated smallpox. Those things too were once considered unlikely.

As a brain scientist who studies perception, I fully expect mind uploading to be a reality one day. But as of today, we're nowhere close.

Living in a laptop

The brain is often regarded as the most complex object in the known universe. Replicating all that complexity will be extraordinarily difficult.