Ashlee Vance has an interesting piece on brain mapping through the physical thin slicing of brains in the New York Times here. It was in this article that I first read about the “connectome,” or the individual wiring of our brain:
“You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.” (par. 5)
The connectome reminds me of Greg Egan’s Diaspora or Greg Bear’s Blood Music as biological humans are converted into citizens in the former or a part of the cooperative noosphere in the latter. The brain has to be taken apart in order to recreate the individual’s memories and ways of thinking as a disembodied intelligence.
What does a life of science fiction thinking, writing, and discourse do to one’s connectome?
Dynamic Subspace 