Human Connectome Project.

You should check out this NY Times article on the Human Connectome project.

Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind.

The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

They are searching the neurobiological basis of all forms of stored information. That is a very difficult task, and will take many decades. Even when you have mapped all the connections, which seems to be the primary goal of the project, the interpretation of the findings is a big issue. How do you translate a bunch of connections back into information? That is the big obstacle. We know that your name is stored inside of your brain, and in a few decades we might know all of your connections. But connecting name with a set of connections is nearly impossible. And let's not forget: they analyse a dead brain, and not time slices of the same brain.

Nevertheless, it is very clear that memories are physically stored in the brain, that we have thousands and thousands of them, that the memories undergo changes, and that they spread from brain to brain.