Resources, glossary and FAQ — where to start looking.
A toolkit for investigating the field yourself: essential reading, key papers, a directory of organisations and open data, a glossary, and short answers to common questions. Exhaustive per-topic bibliographies live at the end of each chapter.
A. Books & Documents
Ten essential works.
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (Sandberg & Bostrom)
The field's shared vocabulary: resolution levels, technology requirements, and a decomposition of the uncertainties. Free PDF. Read this first.
2. Where we are / 2025State of Brain Emulation Report 2025 (Zanichelli et al.)
The first comprehensive stocktake in seventeen years, assessing progress across recording, mapping and emulation. Free.
3. Introduction / 2012Connectome (Sebastian Seung)
The definitive popular treatment of the "I am my connectome" hypothesis, and of its motivations and limits.
4. The origin / 1988Mind Children (Hans Moravec)
The first statement of the gradual uploading procedure, and a historically valuable specimen of optimistic extrapolation.
5. Society / 2016The Age of Em (Robin Hanson)
A thorough economic analysis of the consequences of an emulation economy. The standard text for thinking about the aftermath.
6. Philosophy, sceptical / 2019Artificial You (Susan Schneider)
The best critical examination of "you can survive by uploading", together with a proposal for testing machine consciousness.
7. Pro-preservation / 2024The Future Loves You (Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston)
A neuroscientist's systematic defence of brain preservation, and a contemporary development of patternism.
8. Japanese / 2024The Neuroscience of Consciousness (Masataka Watanabe)
The hemisphere-connection route to gradual migration, plus a survey of consciousness research. The most important Japanese-language work on the subject.
9. The identity classic / 1984Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit)
Teleporters, fission, and "identity is not what matters". The foundation for thinking about the copy problem.
10. Fiction / 1994Permutation City (Greg Egan)
Fiction, but still cited alongside the academic literature as a thought experiment on the copy problem.
B. Papers
Ten key papers — start here.
| Paper | Year | What it established |
|---|---|---|
| White et al. Phil Trans R Soc B | 1986 | The first complete wiring diagram of a nervous system (302 nematode neurons) |
| Prinz, Bucher & Marder Nat Neurosci | 2004 | Degeneracy: disparate parameters produce identical circuit activity — the fundamental warning about uniqueness of reconstruction |
| McIntyre & Fahy Cryobiology | 2015 | Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation — whole-brain preservation that retains structure |
| Dorkenwald et al. (FlyWire) Nature | 2024 | The whole adult fly brain connectome (139,255 neurons) |
| Shapson-Coe et al. (H01) Science | 2024 | Petascale reconstruction of 1 mm³ of human cortex — the technical proof for human EM |
| Shiu et al. Nature | 2024 | A connectome-based whole fly brain model matching experiment — the first evidence that maps can run |
| Zhao et al. (MetaWorm) Nat Comput Sci | 2024 | Closed-loop integration of nematode brain, body and environment |
| MICrONS Consortium Nature | 2025 | The largest combined structure-and-function dataset in a mammal (1 mm³ of mouse visual cortex) |
| Wang et al. Nature | 2025 | A foundation model of neural activity (digital twin) predicting responses to novel stimuli |
| Cogitate Consortium Nature | 2025 | Adversarial test of IIT against global workspace theory — both partly wrong, theory selection still open |
Full bibliographies by chapter: Ch. 1 (35) · Ch. 2 (28) · Ch. 3 (39) · Ch. 4 (20) · Ch. 5 (18) · Ch. 6 (16)
C. Directory
Organisations and open data.
Open datasets anyone can use
FlyWire
Explore 139,255 neurons in a browser. Also the home of the citizen-science proofreading effort.
Mouse structure + functionMICrONS Explorer
1 mm³, 200,000 cells, 523 million synapses, with activity data.
Human cortexH01 Dataset
The 1.4-petabyte reconstruction of 1 mm³ of human cortex, publicly available.
ZebrafishZAPBench
Whole-brain activity prediction benchmark. Enter your own model.
Fly, variousneuPrint (Janelia)
Analysis platform for the hemibrain, male CNS and other connectomes.
GeneralBossDB
The US archive aggregating large-scale neuroimaging datasets.
Organisations
| Category | Organisations |
|---|---|
| Research (public and academic) | Janelia FlyEM · Allen Institute · Princeton (Seung lab) · Harvard (Lichtman lab) · EBRAINS · Open Brain Institute · Brain/MINDS 2.0 (Japan) |
| Industry | Google Research Connectomics · Eon Systems · Cortical Labs · Neuralink, Synchron, Paradromics, Precision Neuroscience (BCI) |
| Non-profit | Brain Preservation Foundation · Carboncopies · OpenWorm · E11 Bio · Foresight Institute · WBAI (Japan) |
| Preservation services | Alcor · Cryonics Institute · Tomorrow Bio · Oregon Brain Preservation · Nectome (research only) — compared in Chapter 6.5 |
D. Glossary
Glossary (28 terms).
- Whole brain emulationWBE
- Measuring the structure and state of a particular brain and functionally reproducing its information processing on a computer. The engineering name for mind uploading.
- Emulation vs simulation
- Simulation models brains in general; emulation functionally copies one particular brain. The distinction is whether the goal is understanding or reproduction.
- Connectome
- The map of all connections in a nervous system — a graph of cells (which neuron) and synapses (where they connect).
- Connectomics
- The field of acquiring and analysing connectomes. Electron microscopy plus AI segmentation is the current mainstream.
- Synapse
- The junction between neurons; roughly 10¹⁴ of them in a human brain. Widely regarded as the principal physical substrate of memory, via its strength or weight.
- Neuromodulator
- Chemical signals such as dopamine and serotonin that switch the behaviour of a fixed circuit depending on context. The leading reason a wiring diagram alone is insufficient.
- Gap junction
- An electrical synapse. Harder to detect in EM than chemical synapses and therefore a blind spot in connectomes.
- Glia
- Non-neuronal brain cells, roughly half the total. Involved in synaptic modulation and homeostasis; how precisely they must enter an emulation is unsettled.
- Electron microscopyEM
- Nanometre-resolution imaging; the only demonstrated way to see synapses reliably. Destructive.
- Expansion microscopyExM
- Physically swelling tissue in a gel so that nanoscale structure becomes visible under light microscopy. Fast and compatible with molecular labelling; a candidate alternative to EM.
- Segmentation
- The AI step that separates individual neurons out of EM images. Its accuracy dominates the cost of mapping.
- Proofreading
- Manually correcting errors in automatic segmentation — tens of person-years for the whole fly brain. Automating it is the field's single largest task (P1).
- H01
- The Harvard–Google EM dataset of 1 mm³ of human cortex (1.4 petabytes, formally published 2024).
- MICrONS
- The large US programme that combined structure (EM) and function (activity recording) in the same 1 mm³ of mouse visual cortex, published in 2025.
- FlyWire
- The international consortium that completed the adult fly whole-brain connectome in 2024, with researchers and citizen scientists proofreading together.
- Hodgkin–Huxley modelHH
- The classical description of neuronal membrane potential by differential equations (1952); the basis of high-fidelity simulation.
- Leaky integrate-and-fireLIF
- A simplified spiking neuron model. The 2024 whole fly brain model matched experiment at this level of detail.
- Spiking neural networkSNN
- A network model that represents firing explicitly. The working lower bound on resolution for WBE.
- Digital twin
- A model trained on real data to predict a system's responses. Since 2025 it has emerged as a new route to functionally copying brain regions.
- Neuromorphic computing
- Hardware built to mimic the brain's spike-based communication (SpiNNaker, Loihi, DeepSouth). A candidate for low-power whole-brain execution.
- Degeneracy
- The property that different internal parameters produce identical observed activity — the fundamental reason measurement alone does not uniquely determine a reconstruction.
- Brain–computer interfaceBCI / BMI
- A device connecting brain to computer directly. Central to the readout axis; implanted patients numbered in the dozens as of 2026.
- Neuropixels
- Silicon probes recording thousands of sites at once, which changed recording density in systems neuroscience by orders of magnitude.
- Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservationASC
- A preservation method combining chemical fixation with cold storage to retain synaptic structure long term (2015). The leading approach today, and a BPF prize winner.
- Cryonics / vitrification
- The practice of preserving bodies or brains at low temperature, and the technique of solidifying without ice crystal formation. The tradition preceding ASC.
- Psychological continuity
- A theory of identity holding the self to be a chain of memory, personality and belief. The philosophical pillar of "uploading is survival".
- Copy problem / gradual replacement
- Whether a duplicate is you, and the counter-procedure of replacing pieces slowly enough to preserve continuity (the Ship of Theseus).
- Substrate independence
- The hypothesis that mind does not depend on its biological material, so the same functional organisation works on another substrate. A consequence of functionalism, restricted by theories such as IIT.
E. FAQ
Twelve common questions.
1. Can anyone be uploaded today?
No. As of 2026 no technology and no provider can scan or upload a personality. What exists is (a) brain preservation services, (b) research demonstrations up to the fly, and (c) chatbot-style "digital clone" products that replay records and are not uploading.
2. When will it be possible?
No single year answers this. Optimistic insiders say the 2040s–50s, the forecasting community's median is around 2070, and sceptics say later or never. The pivot is the whole mouse connectome (expected early-to-mid 2030s) and its validation, which largely fixes everything downstream (Chapter 4).
3. Can a living brain be scanned?
No. Non-destructive scanning at synaptic resolution has no available means within known physics, so the realistic path is destructive scanning of a preserved brain. The exceptional alternative — connecting brain to machine through an interface and migrating gradually, as in Watanabe's hemisphere proposal — remains far from the required interface performance (Chapter 2.4).
4. Would the copy be me?
Philosophically unresolved. Under psychological continuity it can be survival; under biological views it is the creation of someone else. The one broadly shared observation is an asymmetry: intuitions split on instantaneous destructive copying, while gradual migration is accepted as survival by more positions — and engineering is being designed toward the latter (Chapter 5.1).
5. Would an emulation be conscious?
Theories answer in opposite directions. Functionalism and global workspace theory say it could be; IIT and biological naturalism suggest a digital implementation might not be. The 2025 adversarial experiment did not settle theory selection, so the honest answer is that this is currently undecidable — which is itself the argument for ethical caution (Chapter 5.2).
6. What is the hardest part?
Science rather than equipment. Specifically: (1) whether dynamical information such as synaptic weights and modulatory state can be recovered from static structure, and (2) validation criteria for showing something worked. The scale problem in mapping is enormous but is, in character, a problem of funding and automation (Chapter 3).
7. Why did the fly (139,000 neurons) come before the nematode (302)?
Call it the nematode paradox. Nematode neurons are largely non-spiking with scarce electrophysiological data, making dynamics hard to infer from wiring. The fly has spiking neurons, synapse counts that approximate weights, and abundant behavioural experiments, so even a simple model produced a validated reproduction. Difficulty is set by the distance between map and dynamics, not by size (Chapter 2.3).
8. Is brain preservation scientifically meaningful?
That synaptic structure can be preserved has been demonstrated in whole animal brains under third-party evaluation (the BPF prizes of 2016 and 2018, and a whole-pig-brain preprint in 2026). What has not been shown is (a) that the preserved structural information suffices to restore a personality, or (b) any readout technology. Preservation today is therefore an unvalidated long-horizon bet — no more and no less (Chapter 6.5).
9. What does it cost?
Uploading does not exist, so it has no price. Brain preservation ranges from a few tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred thousand depending on provider and method (see the comparison in Chapter 6). Estimates of future emulation running costs are speculative extrapolations of compute pricing.
10. If AGI arrives first, is WBE pointless?
They have different purposes. AGI builds an intelligent machine; WBE tries to continue a particular person. In practice AI progress accelerates every stage of WBE — segmentation, modelling — so the operative relationship is "the more AGI advances, the faster WBE goes". There is also an argument that WBE is a safer route to intelligence aligned with human values (Chapter 4.4).
11. Can I work on this outside the main hubs?
Yes. FlyWire, MICrONS, H01 and ZAPBench are all open, so analysis and contribution are not gated by geography or institution. National programmes exist beyond the US as well — Brain/MINDS 2.0 in Japan for primate mapping, EBRAINS in Europe for simulation infrastructure (Chapter 6.6).
12. What does the law say?
No jurisdiction has law addressing emulations as of 2026. The adjacent areas are law on bodies and anatomical donation (preservation), assisted-death legislation (part of the preservation protocol), and brain-data protection ("neurorights", with Chile's 2021 constitutional amendment as the leading precedent). Legal status, shutdown and copying rights are all legislative blank space (Chapter 5.4).