“Let’s play a game for a second. Imagine we could take your brain, lift it gently out of your skull, and place it inside a robot. Full sci-fi scenario. Wires instead of nerves, servos instead of muscles, a metal chassis instead of skin and bone.” — Better Brain Patreon post, 07/13/26
I’ve been following Dr. Muneer’s neuroscience Patreon for a while because I’m fascinated with how the brain works, but this was the first time I froze at the opening paragraph of a post. I felt dread because I had written a whole novel about a neuroscientist (Yamir) who uploads his brain to a computer to study it. Because that brain (Y1) is alive, we get to experience the world through his eyes (vision sensors) and his daily log files.
While writing The Regolith Temple: A Sci-Fi Thriller, I read 20+ books about neuroscience and a handful of books on artificial general intelligence (not to be confused with AI). But that was a few years ago, and now I was staring at an article that was going to tell me how I did on a project that’s done and over. I didn’t want to read further.
Later that day, I decided to put myself through the dreadful task of finding out anyway. Here’s how that went—and I apologize for the slightly technical language.
The brain needs sensors
Better Brain: A brain left alone without sensors will, among other things, begin to hallucinate to fill in the void of information. It starts generating its own reality in the absence of data that tells it where it exists in the world.
The Regolith Temple: Yamir, my neuroscientist protagonist, already knows that. That’s why his process of uploading a brain takes many weeks instead of being instantaneous. He knows he needs to rewire all the main sensors (visual, auditory, and the other seven) before he even switches Y1 on. Each cortical subsystem needs to learn how to work with the new artificial sensors. For instance, our eyes have physical defects that our brain is used to compensating for. Give it a perfect eye sensor, and it first experiences that sensor as broken. It needs time to adjust.
The brain needs a body
Better Brain: Your brain builds an actual map of your body, and each part gets its own specific real estate on this map. For instance, lips and fingertips get way more cortical space than the back. That’s why, when a part goes missing, people experience phantom sensations from that missing part, often as discomfort and pain they cannot alleviate.
The Regolith Temple: When Yamir turns on Y1, the artificial brain starts screaming in pain. It suffers phantom pain from all the body parts the brain can’t sense. And so Yamir must teach the brain to work with a simulation engine, which is a virtual environment that allows Y1’s brain to think it has a body. Once Y1 can function in his simulation engine, Yamir has to repeat this work to acclimate Y1’s brain to an android body. Like a toddler, Y1 must learn how to walk in it. He can then switch between his virtual world and the android body.
Bonus plot point: I mentioned that fingertips feel more than the back. As Dr. Muneer explains, that’s “why you can read Braille with a fingertip but couldn’t tell someone was writing letters on your shoulder blade with any accuracy.” I used this distinction in my novel. Yamir creates a neuro-sensory vest that allows his pilot son to feel the spaceship’s sensors on the skin of his torso. That sensory real estate is there and can be trained to feel things.
The brain needs true proprioception
Better Brain: “Proprioception is your brain’s constant, second by second awareness of where your body parts are in space, without having to look at them.” Without that constant feedback telling your brain where you end and the outside world begins, “that brain would be piloting its new body like a very careful, very deliberate beginner. You’d be a wonderfully clumsy robot.”
The Regolith Temple: Y1 is teaching his (uploaded) mother how to take her first steps in her android body. He holds her hand, the way she held his hand when he was a toddler. Yamir has made sure they can learn how to walk, throw a ball, run, and jump from heights, because he coded proprioception in from the very beginning of the experiment. Unfortunately, I removed the word “proprioception” from the manuscript during the editing rounds because I didn’t want to overwhelm my readers, but the meaning of it is still in the text.
Phew… How did I do?
I’m happy to report that I didn’t botch any major neuroscience facts while writing my sci-fi thriller. Of course, the way I got the idea to write the novel was from wondering one day what it would be like to upload my brain to a computer. But not like I saw it in sci-fi movies, where they just whoosh their mind from body to computer/android and start living like they now have superpowers. That’s why I read all those science books, to make sure I got the fundamentals right.
You don’t need to read them though. If you want to get a sense of what it truly feels like to be an artificial brain, you can just read The Regolith Temple—and also enjoy a page-turning thriller.
