Perhaps you don't need to. Perhaps you only need to emulate the substrate (neural network, blabla) and then copy an instance of a running brain to it. That may be a lot simpler than understanding the actual processes.
Freeze, dice, slice, scan with an electron microscope, interpolate into a 3D model, analyze into a map of connections, construct the equivalent with software neurons, simulate the sense inputs, throw the on switch.
That's a very interesting paper and appears to confirm that computational power is the least of all the problems - whilst even in 2005 it was possible to run a simulation based on 10^11 random neurons, even the scanning technology we have available at present isn't yet adequate.
