"en nuestro cerebro" plural noun or singular

Question

I want to ask a question about when to pluralise a noun in specific context.

I was writing an essay in Spanish about what the world would be like in 30 years and I wanted to say that computers could be implanted in our heads.

I used the futuro imperfecto for this and thought it would appear as such:

Serán implantados en nuestro cerebro

but I was thinking, in English, we would say

in our brains

but in Spanish, it appears from the examples I have found, this is not the case so it says as "cerebro".

How is this sentence translated?

This is easier to decide about in Spanish than in English, thanks to the pattern "Me lavo los dientes" (rather than "Me lavo mis dientes"). Here's the canonical Q-A for this topic: https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/26171/9385. You could also take a look at https://spanish.stackexchange.com/q/10794/9385. — aparente001, Jan 13 '20 at 03:21

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 13 '20 at 08:38

As hinted in the comments, we would normally use a possessive dative to write this. Most naturally, we would also avoid the passive voice:

Nos implantarán ordenadores en el cerebro
Se nos implantarán ordenadores en el cerebro

where nos is the possessive dative, and the use of se is called pasiva refleja, which is a more natural way to write these passive sentences. If you do want to write the sentence in pure passive form, you would say

Nos serán implantados ordenadores en el cerebro

Regarding your "other" question about plurals, both forms are correct:

Nuestro cerebro podrá comunicarse con estos ordenadores
Nuestros cerebros podrán comunicarse con estos ordenadores

About the part at the beginning about the alternatives to the passive voice -- this is interesting and I'm glad you included it even though it's a tiny bit tangential. Do you want to add an explanation of "Nos implantarán" too -- something about, I'm not sure what to call it, maybe the impersonal "they"? // Do you think that one or the other of the last two bullets is more common or natural than the other? — aparente001, Jan 14 '20 at 00:19

"en nuestro cerebro" plural noun or singular

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