In lofty quest to map human memories, a scientist journeys deep into the mind of a worm

To remember is to conjure the ghosts of places and people that no longer exist. Diving to touch the tiled bottom of the pool as a child and feeling the pressure in your ears. Walking through an orchard with your family and plucking apples from tree branches. Scenes like these float imperceptibly in our minds before a smell or sound fastens them into existence.

Although memories seem ethereal, scientists believe that they may be stored in the connections between neurons called synapses. In theory, a map of a person’s brain charting the location of each neuron and synapse could be a record of memories spanning a lifetime.

Having such a map, known as a connectome, would transform our understanding of the human brain and consciousness. By comparing the neural wiring of healthy and unhealthy brains, researchers could design new treatments for mental illness. Pushing the connectome to its most extreme, enthusiasts imagine a future in which people could achieve a form of immortality by uploading their memories into robots.

The promise of the connectome, though, is matched by the challenges inherent in mapping it.

The human brain, with its roughly 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, is nearly infinite in its complexity. And although scientists have already embarked on mapping specific dense tangles of neurons, it would likely take them thousands of years to scan an entire brain.

As Sebastian Seung, a prominent neurologist at Princeton University, has declared: “Finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest