The brain is really little more
than a collection of electrical signals. If we can learn to catalogue those
then, in theory, you could upload someone's mind into a computer, allowing them
to live forever as a digital form of consciousness. But it's not just science
fiction. Sure, scientists aren't anywhere near close to achieving such a feat
with but there's few better examples than the time an international team of
researchers managed to do just that with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. C.
elegans is a little nematodes that have been extensively studied by scientists
- we know all their genes and their nervous system has been analysed many
times.
In 2014, a collective called the
OpenWorm project mapped all the connections between the worm's 302 neurons and
managed to simulate them in software. The ultimate goal of the project was to
completely replicate C. elegans as a virtual organism. But they managed to
simulate its brain, and then they uploaded that into a simple Lego robot. This
Lego robot has all the equivalent limited body parts that C. elegans has - a
sonar sensor that acts as a nose, and motors that replace the worm's motor
neurons on each side of its body. Amazingly, without any instruction being
programmed into the robot, the C. elegans virtual brain controlled and moved
the Lego robot.
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