TED Talks - آموزش زبان

🔴A cleanse won't detox your body but here's what will #Health #Human_Body #Biology #Food #Health_Care 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

📙درس پانزدهم کتاب 504 لغت ضروری بر روی وب سایت ما قابل دسترسی می باشد. مطالعه دقیق این کتاب به کلیه زبان آموزان جهت بالا بردن دایره لغات توصیه میگردد. ♦️تمامی معانی هر لغت به همراه تلفظ و مثالهای آن آورده شده است👇👇 https://b2n.ir/q57693 Join ➣ @BestIELTS ☜عضويت www.bestielts.ir

These days, I share my story openly, and I ask others to share theirs, too. I believe that's what it takes to help people who may be suffering in silence to know that they are not alone and to know that with help, they can heal. Now, I still have my struggles, particularly with the anxiety, but I'm able to manage it through daily mediation, yoga and a relatively healthy diet. If I feel like things are starting to spiral, I make an appointment to see my therapist, a dynamic black woman named Dawn Armstrong, who has a great sense of humor and a familiarity that I find comforting. I will always regret that I couldn't be there for my nephew. But my sincerest hope is that I can inspire others with the lesson that I've learned. Life is beautiful. Sometimes it's messy, and it's always unpredictable. But it will all be OK when you have your support system to help you through it. I hope that if your burden gets too heavy, you'll ask for a hand, too. Thank you. #Activism #Community #Depression #TED_Residency #Identity #Illness #Personal_Growth #Race #Social_Change #Mental_Health 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴Don't suffer from your depression in silence What are you doing on this stage in front of all these people? Run! Run now. That's the voice of my anxiety talking. Even when there's absolutely nothing wrong, I sometimes get this overwhelming sense of doom, like danger is lurking just around the corner. You see, a few years ago, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and depression -- two conditions that often go hand in hand. Now, there was a time I wouldn't have told anybody, especially not in front of a big audience. As a black woman, I've had to develop extraordinary resilience to succeed. And like most people in my community, I had the misconception that depression was a sign of weakness, a character flaw. But I wasn't weak; I was a high achiever. I'd earned a Master's degree in Media Studies and had a string of high-profile jobs in the film and television industries. I'd even won two Emmy Awards for my hard work. Sure, I was totally spent, I lacked interest in things I used to enjoy, barely ate, struggled with insomnia and felt isolated and depleted. But depressed? No, not me. It took weeks before I could admit it, but the doctor was right: I was depressed. Still, I didn't tell anybody about my diagnosis. I was too ashamed. I didn't think I had the right to be depressed. I had a privileged life with a loving family and a successful career. And when I thought about the unspeakable horrors that my ancestors had been through in this country so that I could have it better, my shame grew even deeper. I was standing on their shoulders. How could I let them down? I would hold my head up, put a smile on my face and never tell a soul. On July 4, 2013, my world came crashing in on me. That was the day I got a phone call from my mom telling me that my 22-year-old nephew, Paul, had ended his life, after years of battling depression and anxiety. There are no words that can describe the devastation I felt. Paul and I were very close, but I had no idea he was in so much pain. Neither one of us had ever talked to the other about our struggles. The shame and stigma kept us both silent. Now, my way of dealing with adversity is to face it head on, so I spent the next two years researching depression and anxiety, and what I found was mind-blowing. The World Health Organization reports that depression is the leading cause of sickness and disability in the world. While the exact cause of depression isn't clear, research suggests that most mental disorders develop, at least in part, because of a chemical imbalance in the brain, and/or an underlying genetic predisposition. So you can't just shake it off. For black Americans, stressors like racism and socioeconomic disparities put them at a 20 percent greater risk of developing a mental disorder, yet they seek mental health services at about half the rate of white Americans. One reason is the stigma, with 63 percent of black Americans mistaking depression for a weakness. Sadly, the suicide rate among black children has doubled in the past 20 years. Now, here's the good news: seventy percent of people struggling with depression will improve with therapy, treatment and medication. Armed with this information, I made a decision: I wasn't going to be silent anymore. With my family's blessing, I would share our story in hopes of sparking a national conversation. A friend, Kelly Pierre-Louis, said, "Being strong is killing us." She's right. We have got to retire those tired, old narratives of the strong black woman and the super-masculine black man, who, no matter how many times they get knocked down, just shake it off and soldier on. Having feelings isn't a sign of weakness. Feelings mean we're human. And when we deny our humanity, it leaves us feeling empty inside, searching for ways to self-medicate in order to fill the void. My drug was high achievement.

🔴Don't suffer from your depression in silence #Activism #Community #Depression #TED_Residency #Identity #Illness #Personal_Growth #Race #Social_Change #Mental_Health 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

Well, ADHD is just one example. We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces for many other cognitive fields. It was just a few years ago that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak. He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond, even not writing because he was illiterate. So he passed away in silence. I remember thinking at that time: What if we could have a computer which could speak for him? Now, after years that I am in this field, I can see that this might be possible. Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns when people think about images or even letters, like the letter A generates a different brainwave pattern than the letter B, and so on. Could a computer one day communicate for people who can't speak? What if a computer can help us understand the thoughts of a person in a coma? We are not there yet, but pay close attention. We will be there soon. Thank you. #Brain #Algorithm #Cognitive_Science #Machine_Learning #Mental_Health #Technology #Neuroscience #Mindfulness 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴What happens in your brain when you pay attention? Paying close attention to something: Not that easy, is it? It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time, and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused. Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on, but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out. There are two ways you direct your attention. First, there's overt attention. In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something in order to pay attention to it. Then there's covert attention. In covert attention, you pay attention to something, but without moving your eyes. Think of driving for a second. Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes, are in front, but that's your covert attention which is constantly scanning the surrounding area, where you don't actually look at them. I'm a computational neuroscientist, and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces, or bringing together the brain and the computer. I love brain patterns. Brain patterns are important for us because based on them we can build models for the computers, and based on these models computers can recognize how well our brain functions. And if it doesn't function well, then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices for therapies. But that also means something, because choosing the wrong patterns will give us the wrong models and therefore the wrong therapies. Right? In case of attention, the fact that we can shift our attention not only by our eyes but also by thinking -- that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers. So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns when you look overtly or when you look covertly. I set up an experiment for that. In this experiment there are two flickering squares, one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one. Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to, certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate as that flickering rate. So by analyzing your brain signals, we can track where exactly you are watching or you are paying attention to. So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention, I asked people to look directly in one of the squares and pay attention to it. In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares appeared in their brain signals which was coming from the back of their head, which is responsible for the processing of your visual information. But I was really interested to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention. So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen and without moving their eyes, to pay attention to either of these squares. When we did that, we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals, but interestingly, only one of them, which was paid attention to, had stronger signals, so there was something in the brain which was handling this information so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area. The front part of your brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions as a human. The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter trying to let information come in only from the right flicker that you are paying attention to and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one. The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention, which is missing in some people, for example in people with ADHD. So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors, and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task. But what if this person could play a specific computer game with his brain connected to the computer, and then train his own brain to inhibit these distractors?

🔴What happens in your brain when you pay attention? #Brain #Algorithm #Cognitive_Science #Machine_Learning #Mental_Health #Technology #Neuroscience #Mindfulness 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. Thank you. #Activism #Youth #Toys 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

The law-enforcement community is admittedly experiencing a recruitment crisis. Yet, if they truly want to increase the number of applicants, they can. We can easily recruit more women and reap all those research benefits by training well-qualified candidates to pass validated, work-related, physiologically-based fitness exams, as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. We can increase the number of women, we can reduce that gender disparity, by simply changing exams that produce disparate outcomes. We have the tools. We have the research, we have the science, we have the law. This, my friends, should be a very easy fix. Thank you. #Social_Change #Women #Justice_System #Work #Feminism #United_States #Diversity #TED_Fellows #Gender 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴How policewomen make communities safer? I've been a police officer in an urban city for nearly 25 years. That's crazy, right? And in that time, I've served in every rank, from police officer to police chief. A few years ago, I noticed something alarming. Starting in 2014, I started monitoring recruits as they cycled through police academies in the state of New Jersey, and I found that women were failing at rates between 65 and 80 percent, due to varying aspects of the physical fitness test. I learned that a change in policy now required recruits to pass the fitness exam within 10 short workout sessions. This had the greatest impact on women. The change meant that recruits had about three weeks out of a five-month-long academy to pass the fitness exam. This just didn't make sense, though. Police agencies and police recruits had made huge investments to get those recruits into the academy. Police recruits had passed lengthy background checks, they had passed medical and psychological exams, they had quit their jobs. And many had spent more than 2,000 dollars in fees and equipment just to get kicked out within the first three weeks? The dire situation in New Jersey led me to examine the status of women in policing across the United States. I found that women make up less than 13 percent of police officers. A number that hasn't changed much in the past 20 years. And they make up just three percent of police chiefs as of 2013, the last time the data was collected. We know that we can improve those rates. Other countries like Canada, Australia and the UK have nearly twice the amount of policewomen. And New Zealand is steadily marching towards their goal of recruit gender parity by 2021. Other countries are actively working to increase the number of women in policing, because they know of a vast body of research evidence, spanning more than 50 years, detailing the advantages to women in policing. From that research, we know that policewomen are less likely to use force or to be accused of excessive force. We know that policewomen are less likely to be named in a lawsuit or a citizen complaint. We know that the mere presence of a policewoman reduces the use of force among other officers. And we know that policewomen are met with the same rates of force as their male counterparts, and sometimes more, and yet they're more successful in defusing violent or aggressive behavior overall. So there are vast advantages to women in policing, and we're losing them to arbitrary fitness standards. The problem is, the United States has nearly 18,000 police agencies -- 18,000 agencies with wildly varying fitness standards. We know that a majority of academies rely on a masculine ideal of policing that works to decrease the number of women in policing. These types of academies overemphasize physical strength, with much less attention spent to subjects like community policing, problem-solving and interpersonal communication skills. This results in training that does not mirror the realities of policing. Physical agility is but a small component of police work. Much of an officer's day is spent mediating interpersonal conflicts. That's the reality of policing. These are my babies. And we can reduce the disparity in policing by changing exams that produce disparate outcomes. The federal courts have stated that men and women simply are not physiologically the same for the purposes of physical fitness programs. And that's based on science. Respected institutions that law enforcement deeply respects, like the FBI, the US Marshals Service, the DEA and even the US military -- they rigorously test fitness programs to ensure they measure fitness without gender-disparate outcomes. Why is that? Because recruiting is expensive. They want to recruit and retain qualified candidates. You know what else the research finds? Well-trained women are as capable as their male counterparts in overall fitness, but more importantly, in how they police.

🔴How policewomen make communities safer? #Social_Change #Women #Justice_System #Work #Feminism #United_States #Diversity #TED_Fellows #Gender 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

📙برای استفاده از روش های تقویت مهارت رایتینگ در زبان انگلیسی خواندن این مقاله را از دست ندهید👇👇 https://b2n.ir/p98088 Join ➣ @BestIELTS ☜عضويت www.bestielts.ir

Finally, for those of you who perhaps are more cynical about all of this, who maybe don't think that virtual worlds and games are your cup of tea. There's a reality you have to accept, and that is that the economic impact of what I'm talking about will be profound. Right now, thousands of people have full-time jobs in gaming. Soon, it will be millions of people. Wherever there's a mobile phone, there will be a job. An opportunity for something that is creative and rich and gives you an income, no matter what country you're in, no matter what skills or opportunities you might think you have. Probably the first dollar most kids born today make might be in a game. That will be the new paper route, that will be the new opportunity for an income at the earliest time in your life. So I kind of want to end with almost a plea, really, more than thoughts. A sense of, I think, how we need to face this new opportunity a little differently to some we have in the past. It's so hypocritical for yet another technologist to stand up on stage and say, "The future will be great, technology will fix it." And the reality is, this is going to have downsides. But those downsides will only be amplified if we approach, once again, with cynicism and derision, the opportunities that this presents. The worst thing that we could possibly do is let the same four or five companies end up dominating yet another adjacent space. Because they're not just going to define how and who makes money from this. The reality is, we're now talking about defining how we think, what the rules are around identity and collaboration, the rules of the world we live in. This has got to be something we all own, we all cocreate. So, my final plea is really to those engineers, those scientists, those artists in the audience today. Maybe some of you dreamed of working on space travel. The reality is, there are worlds you can build right here, right now, that can transform people's lives. There are still huge technological frontiers that need to be overcome here, akin to those we faced when building the early internet. All the technology behind virtual worlds is different. So, my plea to you is this. Let's engage, let's all engage, let's actually try to make this something that we shape in a positive way, rather than once again have be done to us. Thank you. #Gaming #Entertainment #Technology #Culture #Community #Society #Social_Change #Internet #Communication 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

This is a single game world with thousands of simultaneous people participating in a conflict. It also has its own ecosystem, its own sense of predator and prey. Every single object you see here is simulated in some way. This is a game being built by one of the biggest companies in the world, NetEase, a huge Chinese company. And they've made an assistant creative simulation where groups of players can cocreate together, across multiple devices, in a world that doesn't vanish when you're done. It's a place to tell stories and have adventures. Even the weather is simulated. And that's kind of awesome. And this is my personal favorite. This is a group of people, pioneers in Berlin, a group called Klang Games, and they're completely insane, and they'll love me for saying that. And they found a way to model, basically, an entire planet. They're going to have a simulation with millions of non-player characters and players engaging. They actually grabbed Lawrence Lessig to help understand the political ramifications of the world they're creating. This is the sort of astounding set of experiences, well beyond what we might have imagined, that are now going to be possible. And that's just the first step in this technology. So if we step beyond that, what happens? Well, computer science tends to be all exponential, once we crack the really hard problems. And I'm pretty sure that very soon, we're going to be in a place where we can make this type of computational power look like nothing. And when that happens, the opportunities ... It's worth taking a moment to try to imagine what I'm talking about here. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people being able to coinhabit the same space. The last time any of us as a species had the opportunity to build or do something together with that may people was in antiquity. And the circumstances were less than optimal, shall we say. Mostly conflicts or building pyramids. Not necessarily the best thing for us to be spending our time doing. But if you bring together that many people, the kind of shared experience that can create ... I think it exercises a social muscle in us that we've lost and forgotten. Going even beyond that, I want to take a moment to think about what it means for relationships, for identity. If we can give each other worlds, experiences at scale where we can spend a meaningful amount of our time, we can change what it means to be an individual. We can go beyond a single identity to a diverse set of personal identities. The gender, the race, the personality traits you were born with might be something you want to experiment differently with. You might be someone that wants to be more than one person. We all are, inside, multiple people. We rarely get the opportunity to flex that. It's also about empathy. I have a grandmother who I have literally nothing in common with. I love her to bits, but every story she has begins in 1940 and ends sometime in 1950. And every story I have is like 50 years later. But if we could coinhabit, co-experience things together, that undiminished by physical frailty or by lack of context, create opportunities together, that changes things, that bonds people in different ways. I'm struck by how social media has amplified our many differences, and really made us more who we are in the presence of other people. I think games could really start to create an opportunity for us to empathize again. To have shared adversity, shared opportunity. I mean, statistically, at this moment in time, there are people who are on the opposite sides of a conflict, who have been matchmade together into a game and don't even know it. That's an incredible opportunity to change the way we look at things.

Now, what's even more exciting for me is what's about to happen. And when you think about gaming, you're probably already imagining that it features these massive, infinite worlds, but the truth is, games have been deeply limited for a very long time in a way that kind of we in the industry have tried very hard to cover up with as much trickery as possible. The metaphor I like to use, if you'd let me geek out for a moment, is the notion of a theater. For the last 10 years, games have massively advanced the visual effects, the physical immersion, the front end of games. But behind the scenes, the actual experiential reality of a game world has remained woefully limited. I'll put that in perspective for a moment. I could leave this theater right now, I could do some graffiti, get in a fight, fall in love. I might actually do all of those things after this, but the point is that all of that would have consequence. It would ripple through reality -- all of you could interact with that at the same time. It would be persistent. And those are very important qualities to what makes the real world real. Now, behind the scenes in games, we've had a limit for a very long time. And the limit is, behind the visuals, the actual information being exchanged between players or entities in a single game world has been deeply bounded by the fact that games mostly take place on a single server or a single machine. Even The World of Warcraft is actually thousands of smaller worlds. When you hear about concerts in Fortnite, you're actually hearing about thousands of small concerts. You know, individual, as was said earlier today, campfires or couches. There isn't really this possibility to bring it all together. Let's take a moment to just really understand what that means. When you look at a game, you might see this, beautiful visuals, all of these things happening in front of you. But behind the scenes in an online game, this is what it looks like. To a computer scientist, all you see is just a little bit of information being exchanged by a tiny handful of meaningful entities or objects. You might be thinking, "I've played in an infinite world." Well it's more that you've played on a treadmill. As you've been walking through that world, we've been cleverly causing the parts of it that you're not in to vanish, and the parts of it in front of you to appear. A good trick, but not the basis for the revolution that I promised you in the beginning of this talk. But the reality is, for those of you that are passionate gamers and might be excited about this, and for those of you that are afraid and may not be, all of that is about to change. Because finally, the technology is in place to go well beyond the limits that we've previously seen. I've dedicated my career to this, there are many others working on the problem -- I'd hardly take credit for it myself, but we're at the point now where we can finally do this impossible hard thing of weaving together thousands of disparate machines into single simulations that are convenient enough to not be one-offs, but to be buildable by anybody. And to be at the point where we can start to experience those things that we can't yet fathom. Let's just take a moment to visualize that. I'm talking about not individual little simulations but a massive possibility of huge networks of interaction. Massive global events that can happen inside that. Things that even in the real world become challenging to produce at that kind of scale. And I know some of you are gamers, so I'm going to show you some footage of some things that I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to do, from some of our partners. TED and me had a back-and-forth on this. These are a few things that not many people have seen before, some new experiences powered by this type of technology. I'll just [take] a moment to show you some of this stuff.

🔴The transformative power of video games Hello. My name is Herman, and I've always been struck by how the most important, impactful, tsunami-like changes to our culture and our society always come from those things that we least think are going to have that impact. I mean, as a computer scientist, I remember when Facebook was just image-sharing in dorm rooms, and depending upon who you ask, it's now involved in toppling elections. I remember when cryptocurrency or automated trading were sort of ideas by a few renegades in the financial institutions in the world for automated trading, or online, for cryptocurrency, and they're now coming to quickly shape the way that we operate. And I think each of you can recall that moment where one of these ideas felt like some ignorable, derisive thing, and suddenly, oh, crap, the price of Bitcoin is what it is. Or, oh, crap, guess who's been elected. The reality is that, you know, from my perspective, I think that we're about to encounter that again. And I think one of the biggest, most impactful changes in the way we live our lives, to the ways we're educated, probably even to how we end up making an income, is about to come not from AI, not from space travel or biotech -- these are all very important future inventions -- but in the next five years, I think it's going to come from video games. So that's a bold claim, OK. I see some skeptical faces in the audience. But if we take a moment to try to look at what video games are already becoming in our lives today, and what just a little bit of technological advancement is about to create, it starts to become more of an inevitability. And I think the possibilities are quite electrifying. So let's just take a moment to think about scale. I mean, there's already 2.6 billion people who play games. And the reality is that's a billion more than five years ago. A billion more people in that time. No religion, no media, nothing has spread like that. And there's likely to be a billion more when Africa and India gain the infrastructure to sort of fully realize the possibilities of gaming. But what I find really special is -- and this often shocks a lot of people -- is that the average age of a gamer, like, have a guess, think about it. It's not six, it's not 18, it's not 12. It's 34. [Average age of an American gamer] It's older than me. And that tells us something, that this isn't entertainment for children anymore. This is already a medium like literature or anything else that's becoming a fundamental part of our lives. One stat I like is that people who generally picked up gaming in the last sort of 15, 20 years generally don't stop. Something changed in the way that this medium is organized. And more than that, it's not just play anymore, right? You've heard some examples today, but people are earning an income playing games. And not in the obvious ways. Yes, there's e-sports, there's prizes, there's the opportunity to make money in a competitive way. But there's also people earning incomes modding games, building content in them, doing art in them. I mean, there's something at a scale akin to the Florentine Renaissance, happening on your kid's iPhone in your living room. And it's being ignored.

🔴The transformative power of video games #Gaming #Entertainment #Technology #Culture #Community #Society #Social_Change #Internet #Communication 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

While mind uploading is theoretically possible, we’re likely hundreds of years away from the technology and scientific understanding that would make it a reality. And that reality would come with ethical and philosophical considerations: who would have access to mind uploading? What rights would be accorded to uploaded minds? How could this technology be abused? Even if we can eventually upload our minds, whether we should remains an open question. #Animation #TED_Ed #Science #Human_Body #Brain #Technology #Medicine #Computers #Education 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴How close are we to uploading our minds? Imagine a future where nobody dies— instead, our minds are uploaded to a digital world. They might live on in a realistic, simulated environment with avatar bodies, and could still call in and contribute to the biological world. Mind uploading has powerful appeal— but what would it actually take to scan a person’s brain and upload their mind? The main challenges are scanning a brain in enough detail to capture the mind and perfectly recreating that detail artificially. But first, we have to know what to scan. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, connected by at least a hundred trillion synapses. The pattern of connectivity among the brain’s neurons, that is, all of the neurons and all their connections to each other, is called the connectome. We haven’t yet mapped the connectome, and there’s also a lot more to neural signaling. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of different kinds of connections, or synapses. Each functions in a slightly different way. Some work faster, some slower. Some grow or shrink rapidly in the process of learning; some are more stable over time. And beyond the trillions of precise, 1-to-1 connections between neurons, some neurons also spray out neurotransmitters that affect many other neurons at once. All of these different kinds of interactions would need to be mapped in order to copy a person’s mind. There are also a lot of influences on neural signaling that are poorly understood or undiscovered. To name just one example, patterns of activity between neurons are likely influenced by a type of cell called glia. Glia surround neurons and, according to some scientists, may even outnumber them by as many as ten to one. Glia were once thought to be purely for structural support, and their functions are still poorly understood, but at least some of them can generate their own signals that influence information processing. Our understanding of the brain isn’t good enough to determine what we’d need to scan in order to replicate the mind, but assuming our knowledge does advance to that point, how would we scan it? Currently, we can accurately scan a living human brain with resolutions of about half a millimeter using our best non-invasive scanning method, MRI. To detect a synapse, we’ll need to scan at a resolution of about a micron— a thousandth of a millimeter. To distinguish the kind of synapse and precisely how strong each synapse is, we’ll need even better resolution. MRI depends on powerful magnetic fields. Scanning at the resolution required to determine the details of individual synapses would requires a field strength high enough to cook a person’s tissues. So this kind of leap in resolution would require fundamentally new scanning technology. It would be more feasible to scan a dead brain using an electron microscope, but even that technology is nowhere near good enough– and requires killing the subject first. Assuming we eventually understand the brain well enough to know what to scan and develop the technology to safely scan at that resolution, the next challenge would be to recreate that information digitally. The main obstacles to doing so are computing power and storage space, both of which are improving every year. We’re actually much closer to attaining this technological capacity than we are to understanding or scanning our own minds. Artificial neural networks already run our internet search engines, digital assistants, self-driving cars, Wall Street trading algorithms, and smart phones. Nobody has yet built an artificial network with 86 billion neurons, but as computing technology improves, it may be possible to keep track of such massive data sets. At every step in the scanning and uploading process, we’d have to be certain we were capturing all the necessary information accurately— or there’s no telling what ruined version of a mind might emerge.