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rhody
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Latest http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_..._campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email" September 2010
Summary: I found the presentation interesting, a little preachy, a bit over the top at times, however, you could sense Sebastian's enthusiasm for his research, that made it worth watching.
Comment: I know there are a few folks on PF who follow this subject closely and may be or are on a path for research in neurology, it would be nice to hear from them.
I suspect, however, taking all of what we know about how the Universe operates at present, we still need to account for the unpredictability of QM in a truly robust theory of connectomes. That in an of itself adds another whole new level of complexity (and for me at least, wonder) to the study of neurology. But... first things first, if we can test and prove the macro world of chemical and electrical activity in the brain (I have personal doubts, however) to some level of repeatability it will encourage more research with connectomes, if not, then whatever works and replaces it will.
Rhody...
In the brain, neurons are connected into a complex network. Sebastian Seung and his lab at MIT are inventing technologies for identifying and describing the connectome, the totality of connections between the brain's neurons -- think of it as the wiring diagram of the brain. We possesses our entire genome at birth, but things like memories are not "stored" in the genome; they are acquired through life and accumulated in the brain. Seung's hypothesis is that "we are our connectome," that the connections among neurons is where memories and experiences get stored.
Seung and his collaborators, including Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute and Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University, are working on a plan to thin-slice a brain (probably starting with a mouse brain) and trace, from slice to slice, each neural pathway, exposing the wiring diagram of the brain and creating a powerful new way to visualize the workings of the mind. They're not the first to attempt something like this -- Sydney Brenner won a Nobel for mapping all the 7,000 connections in the nervous system of a tiny worm, C. elegans. But that took his team a dozen years, and the worm only had 302 nerve cells. One of Seung's breakthroughs is in using advanced imagining and AI to handle the crushing amount of data that a mouse brain will yield and turn it into richly visual maps that show the passageways of thought and sensation.
- 4:40 Slices of mouse brain: magnified 100,000 times to see branches of individual neurons
- 5:00 Images stacked provide a three dimensional image of the brain
- 6:15 Every neuron is given a unique color
- 6:45 How are brains of men and women different, (woah, here we go...)
- 8:10 Cube of neurons = 6 microns on each side, very very small
- 8:30 Sebastian, you should just give up, neuroscience is hopeless
- 9:20 Curiosity + wonder sometimes leads to despair
- 10:05 Finding human connectome greatest challenges of all time, it will takes generations
- 10:30 Modest goal: to study partial connectomes of small chunks of mouse and human brain
- 11:50 What Sebastian calls neural activity I believe is also referred to as neural plasticity
because he says neural activity can cause your connections to change (same as neural plasticity), your experiences can change your connectome - 14:00 How to test the hypothesis, I am my connectome: attempt to read out memories from connectomes: long termporal memories of sequences of movements of a classical pianist
- 16:15 May allow researchers to see mental disorders in the brain, autism, etc...
Summary: I found the presentation interesting, a little preachy, a bit over the top at times, however, you could sense Sebastian's enthusiasm for his research, that made it worth watching.
Comment: I know there are a few folks on PF who follow this subject closely and may be or are on a path for research in neurology, it would be nice to hear from them.
I suspect, however, taking all of what we know about how the Universe operates at present, we still need to account for the unpredictability of QM in a truly robust theory of connectomes. That in an of itself adds another whole new level of complexity (and for me at least, wonder) to the study of neurology. But... first things first, if we can test and prove the macro world of chemical and electrical activity in the brain (I have personal doubts, however) to some level of repeatability it will encourage more research with connectomes, if not, then whatever works and replaces it will.
Rhody...
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