Neural Modems And Non-destructive Connectomes
Russell Hanson
Prof. Russell Hanson (US)
Professor of Genetics and Multi-scale Biology at Mount Sinai & CEO @ Brain Backup
Russell Hanson is founder and CEO of Brain Backups a company with the ambitious mission of providing non-destructive non-invasive brain imaging at the connectome level. Why would one want a Brain Backup or connectome? This is the image of one's neural connections much like the genome is the image of one's DNA sequence. This means it encodes everything you are, do, and have experienced. Prof. Hanson is also a professor of Genetics and Multi-scale Biology at Mount Sinai. Previously he has worked at Harvard, MIT, and the Technical University of Berlin.
Russell Hanson explores neural modems and non-destructive connectomes, the brain
The connectome is the wiring diagram in your brain; it is what makes you you.
Summary
- A connectome is the brain’s wiring diagram, and research aims to lower the cost of imaging it to $1,000 to enable widespread health, education, and personal assistant applications. - Neural modems convert analog brain signals to digital data, allowing for direct brain-machine interfacing, telepathic communication, and the potential control of external skeletons. - Non-destructive imaging techniques like nano-CT scans and near-infrared imaging allow for sub-micron resolution of brain tissue without the need to destroy the organ by slicing it. - Major initiatives, including DARPA's NESD project, aim to record from one million neurons and stimulate 100,000 more to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s and spinal cord injuries. - Current supercomputing power and computational theory suggest that the human brain’s finite information and functions can be effectively modeled and simulated using digital systems.
Article
Neural Modems And Non-Destructive Connectomes
A Bold Vision For Reading, Repairing, And Perhaps Rewriting The Brain
At Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland on 17 and 18 November 2016, Prof. Russell Hanson delivered a talk that moved restlessly between frontier science, startup ambition and the oldest human fantasy of all: that the mind might one day be mapped, decoded and made interoperable with machines.
The presentation, titled *Neural Modems And Non-destructive Connectomes*, was not modest in scope. Hanson, a professor of Genetics and Multi-scale Biology at Mount Sinai and founder and CEO of Brain Backup, argued that the brain’s wiring diagram, the connectome, could become as accessible as a genome sequence. The target price, he said, was startlingly concrete: “Our goal with connectome imaging is to bring the price down to about the same as the human genome, which is about one thousand US dollars.”
That single figure carried the force of a manifesto. It suggested a future in which the deepest architecture of a person’s mind might be scanned, stored and studied not as an exotic scientific artefact, but as a routine layer of personal biology.
The Wiring Diagram Of The Self
Hanson described the connectome as more than a simple map of neural links. It was, in his framing, a structured portrait of personhood: neurons, their connections, and the metadata that gives those connections functional meaning, including cell subtypes and surface proteins.
The analogy to genomics was central to his case. Just as DNA sequencing reshaped medicine, ancestry research and personal diagnostics, connectome imaging, he suggested, could open an even larger frontier. “Almost anything that is involved with diseases of the brain can be reduced to aspects of brain circuitry and brain wiring,” Hanson said.
The implications were at once medical and philosophical. If memory, mood, injury and decline could be traced back to circuitry, then conditions long shrouded in mystery might become readable in structural terms. Mental illness, neurodegeneration, trauma and cognitive impairment would no longer sit only in the realm of symptoms. They would become, at least in principle, engineering problems.
From Healthcare To Education, And Beyond
The promise Hanson sketched did not end with diagnosis. He pressed into more provocative territory: the possibility that a full connectome might permit direct insertion of information into the brain.
“If you have a full wiring diagram of the human connectome, you could conceivably put information into someone's brain without having them go to school or pay for an expensive education,” he said.
It was a statement likely to inspire equal parts wonder and alarm. Yet it captured the mood of the talk, which repeatedly returned to the idea that human cognition could become writable as well as readable.
Hanson also gestured toward commercial and consumer uses: highly personalised assistants trained on uniquely individual neural data, entertainment systems tied directly to the visual and auditory cortex, even forms of neuro-advertising. Such applications hovered on the edge between speculative capitalism and genuine scientific horizon scanning. Still, they revealed the scale of the claim being made. This was not merely a better scanner. It was an argument that the brain was becoming a platform.
Neural Modems And The Rise Of Brain-Machine Interfaces
If the connectome was the map, the neural modem was the port.
Hanson explained neural modems as systems that convert analog neural activity into digital signals that computers can interpret. In practice, this meant electrode arrays placed on or near the brain, coupled with wireless power and data transmission. Existing systems might record from dozens of electrodes. But the ambition, he noted, was far larger.
He pointed to DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design initiative, describing efforts to push from 64 electrodes toward recording from one million neurons and stimulating 100,000 more. The practical rationale was compelling. Restoring communication, sensation or movement to people with catastrophic injuries was not, in his account, a futuristic luxury but an ethical imperative.
“It is not ethical to withhold this kind of interface from people who have endured injuries, preventing them from interacting with their world or having a normal semblance of life,” Hanson said.
That line gave the talk its clearest moral anchor. Amid the rhetoric of telepathy, simulation and implanted computing, the strongest case remained restorative medicine: spinal cord injury, memory disorders, sensory loss, locked-in states.
Telepathy, Decoded Perception, And The Business Of Neurotechnology
Still, Hanson did not shy away from the sensational edge of the field. He spoke about experiments in which visual and auditory cortex activity had been decoded into approximations of what a person saw or heard. The resulting reconstructions were crude, but the principle mattered. Neural activity could be translated outward.
In one striking suggestion, he imagined Wi-Fi connected brains communicating directly. In another, he referenced long-distance brain-to-brain signal transmission through cortical stimulation. The vocabulary of telepathy, once strictly science fiction, appeared here as an engineering trajectory.
Hanson also situated these possibilities within a rapidly maturing commercial ecosystem. He cited the startup Kernel, which had recently drawn major investment to pursue implanted CPUs capable of interacting with neural codes for memory modulation and treatment of neurological disease. The field, he suggested, was moving from laboratory proof of concept to industrial manufacture.
That shift matters. Technologies begin to change the world not only when they work, but when someone believes they can be made at scale.
Why Non-Destructive Imaging Matters
A major thread of Hanson’s presentation concerned the brutality of traditional connectomics. To image the brain at high enough resolution, researchers have often had to remove tissue, slice it into ultrathin sections and inspect it under microscopes. It is painstaking, expensive and terminal for the organ under study.
Hanson’s company mission, and much of the scientific urgency he described, centred on avoiding that destruction. Non-destructive imaging would allow repeated observation of the same tissue over time. Disease progression could be tracked longitudinally. Learning might be watched as it happened structurally. The brain would no longer be available only as a single postmortem snapshot.
He described nano-CT and contrast-enhanced imaging as promising routes forward. Using agents such as gold, iodine, iron or gadolinium, researchers could increase visibility and approach sub-micron resolution. In one example, Hanson described a nano-CT scan of mouse brain tissue acquired in six minutes at approximately 0.6 micron resolution, clear enough to reveal neuronal bodies and axonal structures.
This was not yet a complete answer to human connectomics, but it was a sign of a changing toolkit. The future of brain mapping, in Hanson’s account, would depend on preserving structure while extracting immense detail.
The Computable Brain
Scepticism, Hanson acknowledged, was never far away. Can a brain really be simulated? Is consciousness reducible to finite information? Are there too many unknown variables for any computational model to matter?
His answer was firmly materialist. “Brain functions can be effectively modeled using computational models,” he said. “If there is a finite amount of information, then any finite state machine can model that information.”
It was a bold distillation of computability theory into public argument. Hanson supplemented it with practical estimates: the human brain’s storage burden, he suggested, might fall somewhere between roughly 384 and 909 terabytes depending on assumptions. Vast, certainly, but not incomprehensible by contemporary hardware standards.
He drew on simpler precedents, including the fully mapped connectome of *C. elegans*, the tiny worm whose 300-neuron network has been simulated and even embodied in robotic systems. No one would mistake a worm for a person. But the logic of scaling from simple nervous systems to complex ones remains one of neuroscience’s animating bets.
The Edge Between Science And Speculation
What made Hanson’s talk compelling was not that every claim seemed equally near. They did not. Some sat in the realm of active engineering, others in the zone of plausible extrapolation, and a few in the charged territory where visionary science begins to sound like metaphysics with funding.
Yet that was precisely the atmosphere at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, where technological possibility was treated less as a distant abstraction than as a design brief.
Hanson’s presentation asked the audience to imagine a world in which the connectome followed the genome’s path from impossibly expensive to almost commonplace. In that world, brains could be scanned without being destroyed, neural signals translated into code, memory and sensation repaired through implanted interfaces, and perhaps one day aspects of thought itself simulated in real time.
Whether that future arrives as promised remains uncertain. But in Helsinki, on 17 November 2016, Russell Hanson gave it a clear shape, a price point and a vocabulary. The brain, he suggested, was no longer just an organ to be studied. It was becoming infrastructure.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki