The Immortalist Horizon

In 2013,

a Russian internet millionaire funded a conference in New York

with an extraordinary aim -

to see if a system could be created

that would allow him to live for ever.

If there is no immortality technology,

I'll be dead in the next 35 years.

Top neuroscientists,

robot builders and researchers were invited.

How long you live really does matter.

How could you increase what we're able to do?

-Konichiwa.

-Konichiwa.

The ambition was to unlock the human brain,

extract the mind

and upload it to a computer.

The ultimate goal of my plan

is to transfer someone's personality

into a completely new body.

It is possible to preserve memory and personality,

for thousands of years, in storage.

Look at that cerebellum right there. Isn't that neat?

Frozen in time.

Meet the immortalist.

My name is Dmitry Itskov.

Within the next 30 years,

I am going to make sure that we can all live for ever.

It's too stupid.

It simply cannot be done.

A waste of time,

a waste of money,

and it's a waste of our humanity.

As our ability to connect brains to technology grows,

is it so crazy to think we could live for ever in machines?

I am 100% confident it will happen...

..otherwise I wouldn't have started it.

Trying to make the impossible possible starts in the imagination.

My biggest dream when I grew up was to be a cosmonaut -

to fly into outer space

and to explore new planets.

That sort of dream has always been with me.

There was an interesting book

and the main hero took some immortality pill,

and he ended up flying on the orbit of Earth.

I remember myself questioning what I was going to do if I'm immortal.

When he grew up, Dmitry Itskov became an internet mogul.

He says he now spends part of his fortune

trying to bring about immortality.

Not everything can be disclosed at the moment but, yes,

I have been funding this science with my own money.

We are talking about millions of dollars.

Dmitry is one of a growing number of the mega-rich

who are funding their own scientific projects.

He is fascinated by signs of a coming world.

Osaka, Japan -

where technology is changing what it is to be alive...

and what it is to die.

Where science fiction is being made real.

The descending scientist

is a builder of robots that look like us...

..and a thinker of seemingly impossible thoughts.

Prof Hiroshi Ishiguro went to Dmitry's conference in 2013.

His ambition is to make his machines

as human-like as possible.

Hiroshi's latest creation eclipses all his others.

This is Erica.

Konichiwa!

Konichiwa!

TRANSLATION:

Ishiguro.

Erica is powered by artificial intelligence -

a database of conversations,

behaviours,

even emotions.

As Hiroshi improves Erica's autonomy,

telling the machine and the human apart

could become increasingly difficult.

Hiroshi's newest machine

is inspiring a dream

of endless life of a kind.

Death is to disappear from this world, right?

Androids like Erica are changing what it might be to die.

Erica is not based on any actual person

but, in the future,

Hiroshi could build android replicas of real people,

powered by databases of real memories and behaviours.

It's a vision of the future some may find unsettling,

to see dead loved ones living on as robot replicas.

Imagine a world where there are no graves to dig...

..a world of mind-spinning possibility...

..home to Dmitry Itskov.

His ambition soars beyond

leaving behind a robot copy of himself when he dies.

The immortality of memories is useless for the individual.

Real immortality is the extension of your journey in this life.

All the rest is just useless

for someone whose world is dying with him,

and real immortality technology should create

something to avoid this death.

Is this just a fantasy of the super-rich?

Because to try to defeat death is to challenge time itself.

Our DNA goes through millions of damaging events per day.

Our cells have the machinery to repair that damage

and we have that machinery throughout life

but unfortunately it gets a little less efficient as we age.

Cardiovascular disease

and other age-related conditions

kill around two-thirds of us.

Unfortunately, you know, ageing is an inevitable process.

We would love to find some elixir,

fountain of youth, that can prolong life for ever

but that's just not how it works.

You know, we're going to die at some point.

The oldest person ever recorded died after 122 years.

But Dmitry has a plan to bypass ageing.

The problem now is that our biological body ages.

That's why I decided to develop a completely new body,

and that would extend the life almost endlessly.

We have long been fascinated

by building mechanical copies of ourselves.

Half a century ago,

it was even predicted we would one day merge

with the machines we make.

We may have a society in which robots will drift away

from total metal toward the organic,

and human beings will drift away from the total organic

toward the metal and plastic,

and that somewhere in the middle they may eventually meet.

The first stage of Dmitry's grand plan

echoes Asimov's prophecy.

He wants to control a new robot body using just the power of his mind.

How do we control our physical, biological body?

We just think of doing an action.

We just think of, let's say, moving an arm

and it moves.

So what is important is to create that sort of experience

with the artificial body -

that you just start perceiving that body as a natural one,

in a way that the new body becomes a part of your personality.

The power of our thoughts is already being harnessed

using knowledge gleaned more than a century ago.

Prof Rafael Yuste is one of the scientists

behind a 6 billion project

to try to map the entire activity of the human brain.

My own personal dream

is to understand how one thought is generated.

Rafael is inspired by the Spanish pathologist Santiago Ramon Cajal,

who discovered the basic building blocks of the brain

in the late 1880s.

Cajal in a way was a cartographer.

He's the cartographer of the mind.

By studying brain tissue, Cajal found that individual cells,

neurons, were connected in circuits.

So these are original drawings from Cajal.

Neurons look like little trees, maybe,

that have branches,

which are the part of the brain

that receives the input from other neurons.

And then they have roots that send information to other neurons.

The human brain is made up of around 86 billion neurons.

These cells communicate information

by sending electrical charges to each other.

So just like little computers

that use zeros and ones to transmit information,

neurons fire these little sparks.

So it's a system of interconnected cells,

and you have to imagine them as flashes of light,

which are actually voltages,

that are propagating like waves through the brain.

The way neurons fire is a complex interaction

of biochemistry, anatomy and physiology.

But scientists can now tap into these electrical signals

and use the power of our thoughts in life-changing ways.

At Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Los Angeles,

researchers are merging the human and the robot more than ever before.

Meet Erik Sorto.

Deep inside his brain are two arrays of electrodes.

In the beginning, I was very conscious of them.

Now I completely forget they're there

until somebody reminds me, like, "What's that on your head?"

I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's right.

"I have two pedestals sticking out of my head."

Erik's life changed when he was 21 and a member of a gang.

I was lost.

I was lost, confused, young and wild.

On January 2nd 2002, I suffered a gunshot

which left me paralysed from the shoulders down.

Erik's spinal cord was severed,

stopping the signals from his brain that control movement

reaching his limbs.

I'm a C3-C4 complete quadriplegic complete.

To try to restore movement he has lost,

Erik is part of a trial to merge his brain with a robot arm.

-Hi, Spencer!

-Hey!

A typical working day for Erik starts like this.

Scientists from Caltech

are connecting Erik's brain to computers

which will decode what he is thinking.

I think this is all good.

Can you move your head?

-Everything good?

-Yeah.

Right, I think you are ready to go.

All right.

The team check they are recording the activity

of a tiny number of individual neurons

out of the 86 billion that make up his brain.

Erik, I'll show you a couple of your units.

So this is channel 64.

64 is looking nice, huh?

Looking very nice, actually. Has a nice high firing rate.

What are you thinking about?

Recording the firing of individual neurons is only possible

because Erik agreed to take a risk others might not.

The most challenging part was the brain surgery.

You ask all the questions

but you never know what can happen during surgery.

We create a window in the skull by cutting out a window of bone.

Surgeons implanted two arrays of 96 electrodes,

about four millimetres long, into Erik's brain.

The ability to record at the single cell level

requires that we do these types of invasive procedures.

The bone filters out quite a lot of the information.

On a given day, the electrodes might pick up around 60 neurons.

They are not always the same ones,

probably because the arrays move slightly.

So Erik has had to train hard

to activate neurons to calibrate the computers.

I have a neuron that, to make it fire,

I have to envision my arm doing a windmill.

I have a neuron that likes to punch

so to get it firing, I pretend I'm jabbing.

-All right, let's get to work.

-So, let's do some training.

To control the robot arm,

Erik must complete two mental tasks

in response to colours appearing on the screen in front of him.

Green is going to be, "Bring your hand to your mouth."

And red will be subtracting,

you're going to start at 100 and count down by six.

As he thinks each thought,

the computers record which neurons fire in his brain.

The green thought will be used to start the robot,

the red to stop it.

This attempt to merge the human and machine

relies on understanding how the brain controls movement.

For three decades,

Prof Richard Andersen has been investigating the workings

of one particular region of the brain.

So we're interested in the posterior parietal cortex.

It's located about here,

this is the back of Erik's head.

We implanted an area around here.

This area forms the intent or early plans to make movement.

Say I want to punch a key on the computer,

it codes that goal rather than the exact way to get there.

The robotic system is crucial

to the way this brain machine interface works.

The idea is, if we can interpret the intent of the subject,

that many of the fine details of the movement

can then be done with a smart robot.

Now Erik is ready to try to pick up a bottle of beer,

using just his thoughts.

-It's the big moment.

-Let's do it.

-You ready?

-All right.

OK, here we go.

He thinks only of the goal of the movement -

bring hand to mouth -

and the robot arm works out the rest.

There you go.

First step done.

When you go to reach for something,

you don't walk it step by step.

You just do it.

Once the arm has grasped the bottle,

Erik thinks, "Bring hand to mouth," again.

But just as Erik is supposed to think his stop thought...

And then can you switch over to the arithmetic, do the subtraction?

..there's a problem,

and the arm is stopped automatically.

I think what's happened is that the neural activity has changed

a little bit since we waited a few minutes to do the testing.

The arithmetic changed a little bit.

On other occasions,

Erik has succeeded in drinking a bottle of beer using just his mind.

All right!

Have you finished that thing off? That's good.

His progress in this extraordinary trial

has extended what it is to be human.

-Yeah!

-There you go.

In the beginning it was my brain, my arm and the robotic arm.

Now when I go in there, it's my brain and the arm.

We are one, and it feels like my arm.

I think the brain is...

It's a part of us that is ready to use any tool available

to keep on... to keep us moving forward

and helping us live a better life.

In Dmitry Itskov's imagination,

the day will come when we all use our minds to control robots.

It won't just be arms but entire bodies,

the first step in his grand plan to achieve immortality.

It now exists in this medical sphere

but organically, naturally,

the transition towards healthy people will be made...

will be made soon.

A healthy person could get an implant like this

but then they'd be up against

having to have a surgical procedure.

So I think that seems to be much too high a hurdle.

In the future, you can imagine, you know,

many scenarios and interesting things

but I think what we're doing now,

it's purely a medical application.

These scientific advances are fuelling grand dreams

of changing humanity's destiny.

But is it ever really going to be possible

to replace our biological bodies with machines?

If there is a way,

the answer lies in understanding far more

about how the human brain generates thoughts,

because Dmitry's plan isn't just to connect a brain with a robot

but to extract thoughts

and implant them into a computer.

The ultimate goal of my plan

is to transfer someone's personality into the new artificial carrier.

Different scientists call it uploading

or they call it mind transfer.

I prefer to call it the personality transfer.

It's an ambition so audacious

Dmitry Itskov has a team to advise him.

His scientific director manages the details of this plan

to escape the ravages of time.

Dr Randal Koene makes it his business

to stay across the work of key neuroscientists.

I travel to their labs all the time.

I keep up with the latest work,

make sure that I know what's cutting edge,

and try to figure out how things fit together well.

He won't reveal which work they are funding

or for how much.

Like Dmitry, Randal's passion to free himself from time

is a lifelong dream.

As a teenager, you want to be many things.

You want to be an astronaut but you want to be a mountain climber.

You want to be a writer and you want to be a scientist and an engineer.

There's too little time to do that

so how long you live, that really does matter.

Randal was formerly a research professor

at Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain

before leaving to pursue his fantastical vision

of humanity's future.

How could you increase what we're able to do?

How could you experience things

that right now only our machines can experience?

We send robots to the planets

because we can't really live in space.

But imagine if we could!

Randal draws on neuroscience

which has predominantly approached the brain

as if it worked like a computer.

In this analogy,

the brain turns inputs - sensory information -

into outputs - our behaviour -

through computations.

That which is us - yourself, your awareness, your memories -

all of that is expressed in terms of information.

Now Randal makes a leap in the dark.

Information can be copied, information can be archived.

It can be extended.

So if you can deal with it as information,

then the sky's the limit.

Randal has devised a road map

for how to go about actually transferring a person's mind

to a machine.

I like to think of it as an area

that has four main types of problems.

What we need to understand is the structure of the brain.

But that's not enough.

So the other part of the problem is what we call function.

Something goes in and something comes out.

Then there's the question,

what do you do with all that structure and function data?

How do you express this as math, as models?

And finally,

you need something like a bunch of chips

or something else that is your implementation.

Those are the four parts of the road map.

The road map seems clear

but could we ever reach its destination?

Any plan to upload the mind

relies on understanding the deepest workings of the brain.

But cracking this extraordinary organ

is proving to be a challenge like no other in science.

The brain generates all of our behaviour

but also, it generates all of our mental world.

It generates our mind and now the challenge is precisely to...

how to go from a physical substrate of cells

that are connected and all together inside this organ,

to our mental world -

to our thoughts, to our memories, to our feelings.

How the neurons that make up the brain

give rise to every aspect of us

is a mystery that has endured since the days

of Santiago Ramon Cajal,

the founding father of neuroscience.

Actually, he has a beautiful quote here in Spanish

precisely about this topic.

TRANSLATION:

For all that has been learned

in the decades since those lines were written

about the complex anatomy and physiology of neural firing,

how our brains give rise to our consciousness remains opaque.

Right now, it's still mostly mysterious.

It's still... We are still in the times of Cajal, of talking,

thinking about these mysterious butterflies of the soul, no?

Given the mystery that shrouds the workings of the brain,

is Dmitry Itskov right to even dream of uploading his mind to a machine?

In all politeness, I mean, other people might say he's mad.

Yeah, I guess all of the evidence seems to say, well,

in theory, it's possible.

It's extremely difficult but it's possible.

So then you could say someone like that is ambitious, is visionary,

forward-thinking, maybe a little ahead of their time.

But not mad,

because being mad sort of implies that you're crazy,

that you're thinking of something that's just impossible,

and that's not the case.

So how far have the immortalists got?

One answer lies in the edge lands of Los Angeles.

On the border between the known and the unknown,

a neuroscientist who by day maps the structure of the brain

at a respected research institute

and by night works on uploading his mind to a computer.

I wouldn't have known how to play it safe even if I tried.

Dr Ken Hayworth has been fascinated by the potential of the brain

since childhood.

When I was a kid, I very much wanted to go into space.

How can I, myself, get to another star?

Is that possible?

This was in high school,

I was reading neural network books at the time.

And at some point, it dawned on me - we are just information.

We could be encoded as ones and zeros,

and we could transmit ourselves at the speed of light

to the nearest star.

Ken approaches the brain as if it were a computer,

the analogy used by many mainstream neuroscientists.

The brain is a beautifully put-together, complex

computational device that gives rise to not only intelligence

but consciousness and emotions,

and it is scrutable.

It is understandable.

Ken uses an electron microscope to image tiny pieces of mouse brain.

He is trying to map the connectome,

the complex connections of all the neurons.

He's convinced this wiring diagram,

if it could be made for our brains,

holds the key to uploading the mind.

The connectome in our brain

is encoding all of our memories that make us "us"

and so, in the same sense that my computer

is really just the ones and zeros on my hard drive,

and I don't care what happens

as long as those ones and zeros make it to the next computer,

it should be the same thing with me.

I don't care if my connectome is implemented in this physical body.

What I care is if that connectome is implemented in any physical body,

whether it be a human body

or a computer simulation controlling a robotic body.

Plotting out the connectome would be the first step in Randal's road map.

But it is a vast, perhaps even impossible, undertaking.

We are pitifully far away from mapping a human connectome.

Every single synapse in the brain,

all trillions and trillions of them...

To put it in perspective, in order to image a whole fly brain,

it is going to take us approximately one to two years.

The idea of mapping a whole human brain

with the existing technology that we have today

is simply impossible.

Even if the connectome could be traced,

Ken believes the second stage of the road map -

understanding what the brain does, its physiology -

would also be needed.

If we were somehow given a structural synaptic diagram today

of a whole human brain,

we wouldn't be able to do much with it

because we still have all of that additional electrophysiology data

that has to be gathered as well.

These have to come together

to actually add up to a complete simulation of the brain.

Progress on the second stage of the road map -

what the brain does -

is being made.

In the centre of New York,

at Columbia University,

Prof Rafael Yuste is leading a bold effort

to map the constant activity of the brain.

It is a critical part of what is known as the Obama Brain Initiative.

The ambition of the world's biggest neuroscience project

was made clear to Rafael

at a crucial meeting at the White House.

It was the week after they landed the Rover in Mars.

And so the meeting started

with Tom Kalil from the White House opening the meeting

and saying, "This has been a good week for us.

"Now let's talk about the brain.

"If we can put this thing in Mars,

"how come we cannot solve schizophrenia?"

-OBAMA:

-The next great American project,

that's what we're calling The Brain Initiative.

6 billion has been pledged

to try to solve the mysteries of brain disorders

that affect millions of people.

One major strand of the initiative

is Rafael's ambitious plan

to map the constant interaction of neurons in the brain,

its physiology.

We want to measure every spark from all the neurons

at once, simultaneously.

Many people said it's just impossible.

As a start, Rafael is focusing on mapping the neural activity

of a tiny freshwater invertebrate.

Hydra is an example of an cnidarian

that has one of the simplest nervous systems in evolution.

So, in the tree of life,

cnidarians is the first time that animals have neurons.

The hydra has between 300

and a few thousand neurons

distributed in a network,

a tiny fraction of the 86 billion in the human brain.

Somehow this structure of neurons across the body of the animal

controls behaviour.

So it offers a golden opportunity

to understand how the activity of the entire nervous system

can generate behaviour.

One of the great challenges of neuroscience

is how to see the activity inside a brain as it happens.

In this case, Rafael solved it by genetically modifying the hydra.

We've made a transgenic animal

expressing a calcium indicator in every single neuron.

As a neuron fires,

calcium comes into the cell

and binds to a dye that can be tracked.

The little dots of light that you see in the screen

are the neurons of the animal.

And when the neurons are activated, they're flashing.

When it contracts, you can see how the neurons are flashing,

very likely because its neurons

are sort of controlling the muscle of the animal

and making it contract.

In this research, yet to be published,

Rafael and his team have imaged the activity

of close to every neuron in a brain for the first time.

It was very exciting. It's thrilling.

I'm still thrilled when I look at it.

On the other hand, at this point, today,

we just cannot tell you what these patterns mean.

So it's a little bit like listening in on a conversation

in a foreign language that you don't understand.

Decoding the complete patterns of neural activity of a brain

has never been done.

We should be able to do it.

I mean, after all, there is no magic here.

This is just a bunch of neurons firing together.

Rafael and his team have catalogued around 30 hydra behaviours.

The next task is to match these up

with the pattern of neuronal activity

to understand how the brain controls the organism's behaviour.

If we're successful,

we'll be reading the mind of this little cnidarian,

the little hydra.

We will be able to look at the activity

and know what it's thinking, so to speak.

The plan is to scale the research up.

Within 15 years,

new tools should allow every neuron in the mouse cortex to be imaged.

But the ultimate aim is to unlock the biggest brain of all - our own.

We should be able,

if science progresses correctly,

to decode that activity

and re-interpret that activity

in the same way that the brain itself interprets it.

So we will be able to essentially access the thought,

the mental processes that go on in animals or in a human.

If you call this downloading, or deciphering...

So that part, I think it's in our future.

If we could interpret the activity of the brain,

it could help solve diseases like Alzheimer's.

But it might also have an unintended consequence.

If the brain were a digital computer,

if you wanted to upload the mind,

you need to be able to decipher it or download it first,

so I think it's a necessary step.

The Brain Initiative, or the brain activity map,

is a step that is necessary for this uploading to happen.

The results of this research can't come soon enough for Dmitry Itskov.

He believes we are living in dangerous times...

..and immortality may be humanity's salvation.

We will be able to live in space.

And we could potentially move somewhere in the future

if this planet is in danger.

And you can apply this approach, I think, literally, to every threat.

But he shouldn't relax.

At Duke University in North Carolina,

evidence is emerging that challenges key assumptions

of the mind uploaders.

Prof Miguel Nicolelis is a brain-machine interface pioneer

who's developing an exoskeleton to help the paralysed walk.

He rejects the analogy used by many neuroscientists

that the brain works like a computer.

This is a common metaphor that has quite a lot of power

because computers have acquired a lot of power.

And they are the most complex things that, arguably, humans make.

But they don't even get close

to the level of complexity that a human brain

is capable of handling or generating.

After all, computers are just projections

from our abstract thinking

but they don't use neither the language nor the logic

that our brains actually utilise...

employ to actually produce these abstractions.

The brain is so complex because it is constantly changing.

The best analogy I have for the brain

is that the brain is like an orchestra.

That every time it composes or plays a tune,

the tune itself changes the instruments of the orchestra.

The way complexity emerges from, you know,

the biological matter that forms our brains

is very different from what you get from pieces of electronics.

Let's turn on the pre-amps.

Now we're connecting to a brain.

Miguel is running an experiment

to harness the ability of the brain to adapt

that could one day help blind people see.

We have it set up.

OK, she's doing it.

On the rat's head are four sensors.

When they detect infrared light,

they send electrical pulses to electrodes in her brain.

Eric implanted the tactile part of her cortex,

the part of the cortex, this surface of the brain here,

that processes information from the face -

more precisely, from the whiskers in the face.

Infrared light is fired randomly from different directions.

If the rat goes to its source, she gets a reward.

-Wow!

-She's doing almost 100% now.

Her reaction time is amazing.

She just jumps to the correct one.

If it was a visible light, it's as fast.

Yeah, look at that, she just jumped to that one.

The rat's performance is revealing something extraordinary.

She's going after the infrared beam just by sensing it,

feeling it, as if it was...

if it were a tactile stimulation to her body,

to her face, more specifically.

I would give a lot just to talk to this rat

and learn what she's feeling right now.

Must be a weird tactile sensation to touch light.

This work could lead to neuro-prosthetic devices

that give sight to the blind

and even extend it.

Most of the effort today is to put an implant in the retina

but that's very difficult.

Why not go to the visual cortex directly

and create not only regular vision

but also provide other types of inputs,

infrared or X-ray or whatever?

It may become useful.

By taking on a new sense,

this rat could also confound the mind uploaders.

It doesn't really support their argument.

It supports the fact that brains can learn new tricks.

That's what brains are good for.

It gets raw information and generates something out of it -

knowledge.

That transformation cannot be done in a machine like that.

You're never going to get a machine

to generate knowledge out of information.

Miguel believes the dynamic complexity of the brain,

from which the human condition emerges,

cannot be replicated.

You cannot code intuition. You cannot code aesthetic beauty.

You cannot code love or hate or prejudice.

There is no way you will ever see a human brain

reduced to a digital medium.

It's simply impossible to reduce the complexity

to the kind of algorithmic process

that you would have to have to do that.

If somebody is saying that the brain is not computational,

the question becomes, what is it, then?

Because computational is essentially another term for materialist,

that it obeys the laws of physics, of cause and effect.

Are we saying that the brain is not a device

that obeys the laws of cause and effect?

But could the brain obey the laws of physics

without being a computer?

At Columbia University, questions are being asked

about whether the brain could be a biological machine

that might be impossible to copy.

The idea that you can upload the mind

assumes that the mind is some sort of digital computer.

But the activity of one of the simplest brains in evolution

suggests it might work in a very different way.

What's really surprising is what happened, like, right here.

When there is activity going on

in the nervous system of the animal without any apparent movement,

without any apparent contraction,

this continuous pattern is like a flash.

It goes through the whole body of the animal

and it's really exciting.

It's... You know, scientists, we thrive on trying to understand

things that are mysteries or puzzles.

It is a puzzle because it can't be explained

by the traditional model of the brain used in neuroscience.

You can imagine that the mind or brain would be this box.

And this box reflects the sensory inputs

that are coming in from the outside, the sensory world,

and uses that information to generate a motor output.

And this is our behaviour.

So it's a very simple input/output machine,

just like a digital computer.

This model cannot explain the continual activity of the brain.

Why do the neurons in this animal fire spontaneously

when the animal is not doing anything?

What is it doing? Is it thinking?

Rafael is developing a theory that tries to explain

how the spontaneous activity in the brain is generated.

It's not that the brain reflects the world, is a copy of the world.

It's the opposite - that the brain generates the world.

The world is a copy of our brain.

What we perceive, what we see is not what's out there.

It's what we have inside.

There is activity going on here,

regardless of whether there's input or not.

The input and the output are not essential.

What's essential is actually this internal machine

and this may be very different from a digital computer.

It's not a machine that you can understand

by taking it step by step,

like you can with this machine.

The old model assumed each neuron had a specific job to do.

For several decades,

the focus of neuroscience has turned

to how vast groups of neurons work together.

Now Rafael is trying to develop the tools

to see the activity of all the neurons in a brain

at the same time.

So this is just like trying to watch a TV screen.

You're looking at a movie

and imagine trying to see that movie

if you can only see a single pixel of the screen.

You'd never understand what's playing.

So what if the function of the brain,

it's like that TV screen,

and each neuron is one pixel.

And the movie that's playing, the movie is an emerging property.

By definition, again, it's not present in the individual pixel.

You have to look at them all together.

Dmitry Itskov's dream of immortality

hangs in the balance

between two visions of how the brain might work.

If that's true, you may be able to download the mind of a person

because it would be downloading all the information

and then play it back.

But if this is the way the brain works,

then it's not obvious to me that you're going to be able to do this.

And it depends on this issue

of whether the brain's a computer or not.

For all the competing views

of how the brain might give rise to every aspect of us,

there is no scientific proof

that mind uploading could be done or not.

In its absence,

Dr Ken Hayworth is pressing on with his own plan to upload his mind.

I'm probably a very practical, brute-force-minded thinker.

Ken has come to 21st Century Medicine,

east of Los Angeles, to see a new prototype.

He hopes it will deliver the clever twist at the heart of his plan

to achieve immortality.

Let's find some way to just stop time.

All right!

Dr Robert McIntyre has devised a new way

to try to stop time's relentless motion.

All right, here are the samples.

All right, so here is the pig brain right there...

-..frozen in time.

-Wow!

This biomedical company

develops new preservation methods for entire organs.

Ken's aim is different.

He wants to preserve the information within a brain

until science can extract it.

This brain was profused with fixative, glutaraldehyde,

so that it literally solidifies without freezing?

-Yeah.

-Wow!

The fixing agent glutaraldehyde renders the brain dead.

It's basically saying let's not be scared of injecting somebody

with a completely deadly poison, glutaraldehyde,

because, after all, that is simply

gluing the molecular machinery in place,

which preserves its information.

Other immortalists preserve brains to try to revive them in the future.

Ken's plan relies on trying to preserve the information

he believes lies in the connectome.

If I am looking down at these electron micrographs

and I see that basic connectivity,

the synaptic connection between two neurons,

then I can really be quite sure

that the function or memories that that piece of brain tissue encoded

is still there.

Dr McIntyre's method does preserve connections between neurons

but whether the connectome encodes memories

and whether they could be preserved is unknown.

But Ken believes a method like this

will soon let him travel into the future.

The preserved brain at this level should store all of those memories,

all of those personality traits

for thousands of years in storage.

That could allow imaging technologies of the future

to read off the connectome

and potentially simulate it.

If there was ever a reliable method,

Ken wants every hospital to offer the terminally ill

the option of preserving their brains,

even if it means choosing to die.

Let's say I am diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

It would make no sense whatsoever

to slowly, painfully be erased in front of all of my loved ones

until I finally have my heart stop.

It would make much more sense

to say, "We've got to intervene before you are erased.

"We've got to intervene."

And that intervention is in the form of

preserving the brain structures before they get destroyed,

with the legitimate hope that a century from now

science will advance to bring you back.

Across the world, the immortalists are gathering strength.

Their case is built on many profound unknowns

but neuroscience cannot rule out the possibility

of uploading the mind.

The pathway that leads within new neuro-technologies

to our understanding of the brain

is the same pathway that could lead, theoretically,

to the possibility of mind uploading.

I do think that scientists that are involved in this method

have the responsibility to think ahead.

Mind uploading would usher in a world fraught with risk.

If you could replicate the mind

and upload it into a different material,

you can, in principle, clone minds. These are complicated issues

because they deal with the core of defining what is a person.

Rafael is on the Brain Initiative's ethics panel

that oversees how new technologies are used.

I would put the mind uploading in the list of the topics

that should be very carefully discussed and thought through.

I will answer you to the question of ethics

by the opinion which was given to me

by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

when I visited him in 2013.

So his point was that you can do everything

if your motivation is to help people.

Since the dawn of humankind,

impossible dreams of immortality have burned in the minds of some.

For the next few centuries,

I would envision having multiple bodies

and one probably would live in something like a traditional Earth.

The other body will be probably somewhere in space.

As the scientific search for the butterflies of the soul intensifies,

we are still to discover

if our consciousness could ever be replicated in a machine.

Another body would probably be hologram-like

and I envision my consciousness just moving from one to another.

We are now embarking on a journey into a very different world.

Whether we find we can live for ever in machines or not,

for some, the journey will certainly change what it is to be human.