Immortality awaits. As you draw your dying breath, we will inject a preservative into your brain that will fix in place every one of the trillion or so connections between your 86 billion neurons. We will then trace those wires, building the complete map of your brain’s connections, your “connectome”. Upload that complete wiring diagram to a computer, simulate the brain’s dynamics upon it — and you live again.

Such is the promise of mind uploading. It is predicated on a common idea: that the wiring between neurons is what stores your memories, is what makes you, well, you. Companies…

In 1998, an engineer in Sony’s computer science lab in Japan filmed a lost-looking robot moving trepidatiously around an enclosure. The robot was tasked with two objectives: avoid obstacles and find objects in the pen. It was able to do so because of its ability to learn the contours of the enclosure and the locations of the sought-after objects.

But whenever the robot encountered an obstacle it didn’t expect, something interesting happened: Its cognitive processes momentarily became chaotic. The robot was grappling with new, unexpected data that didn’t match its predictions about the enclosure. The researchers who set up the…

In 2010, an escaped convict named John McCluskey killed an older couple while stealing their camping trailer. Despite the horrific nature of the crime, the jury rejected a death penalty sentence based on a brain scan that revealed damage to McCluskey’s frontal lobe. Jurors believed this damage made him less culpable for the crime. In a way, they believed that his brain made him do it.

The field of neuroscience has attracted the attention of legal practitioners for decades. …

When you hold a human brain in your hands, it doesn’t feel how you’d expect.

Most people think of something soft and mushy, like a stress ball or a Jell-O mold. But pulled from a jar of formaldehyde, the brain is much denser and less yielding — it’s like holding a wad of suet.

For cognitive science (neuroscience) majors at Johns Hopkins University in the early 2000s, Brain Day was a right of passage. …

Algorithms have thrown the gauntlet down. They’re challenging our distinctive status as the most advanced learning species on the planet. In the past several years, machines have “learned” to instantaneously transcribe a foreign language and detect typos in our Google Docs; they’ve predicted the superfecta of the Kentucky Derby, provided well-wrought medical advice, composed classical music albums, and humbled us at chess. And yet, according to the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, the most sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies are still far less smart than the learning capabilities contained in even an infant’s brain.

While the iPhone’s voice-controlled assistant Siri can recognize…

Last year, a woman from the United Arab Emirates woke up in a German hospital after a road accident in 1991 left her in a coma for 27 years. Her doctors couldn’t believe it.

Her case was exceedingly rare. Only a handful of other patients have ever recovered after that long. Some people may gradually come out of a coma or wake up after a few weeks. Some become what’s known as “minimally conscious,” showing occasional awareness and responsiveness. Others may enter a vegetative state — where they seem awake but show no signs of awareness. …

For years, Frank Plummer was dependent on alcohol, drinking 20 ounces of scotch a day. An infectious disease scientist who worked in Kenya at the height of the HIV epidemic, Plummer turned to alcohol in the 1980s to deal with the stress of his job, and also the grief that came with witnessing the devastation of AIDS firsthand.

Plummer drank to celebrate and relax, too. Alcohol controlled his life, but he didn’t realize that until 2012, when his liver began to fail. Even when he got a liver transplant in 2014, he soon started drinking heavily again. He tried Alcoholics…

Studying how the human brain develops is difficult. Brain tissue can’t be removed from living people, and although it can be examined after someone dies, dead organs are not ideal for studying the mechanisms that give rise to brain disorders. Animal brains can only tell scientists so much, and human fetal tissue is hard to come by.

As an alternative to real brain tissue, researchers have recently figured out how to turn stem cells into neurons and grow them until they form tiny, three-dimensional blobs of brain tissue no bigger than a pea. Now, these aren’t actual human brains, of…