I always thought it is more likely via alternative approach: figure out how the plug-n-play nature of the brain works (one part of the brain can substitute for damaged part, it must be built out of small plug-n-play-ish units (cortical columns?) ), then you can perhaps connect brain to the hardware running that simulated network, have the function 'expand' into there, get smarter and figure out how to scan or recreate the rest. Still an enormous problem, of course, but there's a better way to copy data from one computer to other computer than shaving off the plastic from the flash memory chips then using a scanning electron microscope to read off the data.