http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2012/nimh-29.htm has images of human and monkey brain scans which reveal an amazingly grid-like pattern of neuronal connections. What are the implications? Could brain scanning, emulation etc be simpler than would appear from images of tangled up neuronal cells (eg here: http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/brain.html)?
(My mother is a retired neuroscientist... I'd ask her for comment, but she is on holidays.)
My memory from Ken Hayworth's talk was that the problems were 1)plastinating brains in the first place without losing information, 2) being able to slice them thinly enough that all the information is scannable, again without the slicing destroying anything, 3) having enough cheap electron microscopes that it wouldn't take thousands of years to scan a single brain. It seems to me there's a fourth problem, doing something useful with the scanned information, but I don't remember much talk about that one.
So not really helped by how connections are shaped, as far as I can understand.