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New Map IDs the Core of the Human Brain
gerald626 writes "An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking — connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain. So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub. I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?"
I'd welcome our new intelligent overlords!
all running round robin =)
Come on, you know it's coming.
... I measure intelligence as total bandwidth capacity over my neural-net!
I run reality at 120mb/sec! Neener-neener, dial-up head!
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
I think this will be instrumental as a tool for other research such as getting a much finer grain understanding of which part of the brain is responsible for which prosess. There are still so many things we don't understand about the brain. I hope they cooperate with other researchers who would use this as a preprocessing step to their work.
Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.
How much friggin' tax money did these guys spend discovering what we've already known for at least six millennia now?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Are schitzophrenics equipped with a neural equivalent of a dlink hub?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
So we've found a candidate for the centre of consciousness in the brain. Who's up to volunteer to have it removed to see if they turn into a philosophical zombie?
You would not want a switch. Isolating all but broadcast packets to just their destination would stifle creativity. It has to be a hub and bandwidth in a highly-interconnected net may be unimportant.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Lame. So very lame.
"The researchers then asked whether the structural connections of the brain in fact shape its dynamic activity, Sporns said. The study examined the brains of five human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques to compare how closely the brain activity observed in the fMRI mapped to the underlying fiber networks.
"It turns out they're quite closely related," Sporns said. "We can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do."
Phrenology might be on the come back! Quick, get me my skull maps!
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?
Are you sure it would be an upgrade? The brain is a pretty incredible organ.
Thousands of cores are the future. Intel said so.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
Damn germans!
Their newly mapped "medial and parietal cortex hub" is pretty close to the pineal gland, after all :).
Seriously, if we're going to kill them anyway, why not ask for volunteers to be experimented on? Anyone who survives, gets to have their sentence commuted?
Now we just need to figure out how to perform a denial of service attack.
my brain is still on dial-up.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
seems to be another word for tractography, which is more well known.
So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub.
Now it's just a matter of figuring out the protocol used and hooking up a few brains together. Seriously
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
"I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?" I look forward to re-reading this in three years.
...Artificial Intelligence programming to come to these results?
The core is really small. It has something to do with multiple sclerosis, or something. I don't really understand:
HJ Simpson core
Downgrade to a GigE switch.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these... Wait, isn't that basically a "Think Tank"?
that seems to shut down lots of brain activity.
Humans need to start defining the brain in terms of their rights -- specifically, that nobody has a right to read, write, or interfere with information within these nerve centers against our wishes.
Not at ANY age, nor for ANY contract or job application.
I suggest you read Slashdot
lol
Diffusion imaging is not new and the problems are well-known. Basically, you try to estimate a flow by sampling a lot of points and connect them if they go in (more or less) the same direction. If a flow (in this case a fiber) changes direction too much between sample points, you make a mistake. Also, averaging over 5 people can lead to strange errors, but I guess the authors are competent enough to avoid those pitfalls.
The thing about the hub isn't that interesting: don't think all traffic passes through it. And these fiber tracts are not supposed to do much processing anyway. It does strike me that the map is asymmetrical.
One of the authors is quoted as saying: "This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do." That should probably be: from knowing the structure we can partially predict the BOLD response (what you measure in fMRI). So much for journalism.
i wonder if they've IDed the id ? :P
GoogleBrainMaps, actually.
No "mashups," please!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
This is a very nice article, freely available to boot. However this is not the end of the story. Connectivity was discovered throught DT-MRI, essentially today yields an orientation tensor at each voxel. At present DT-MRI is really low resolution. There is quite a bunch of guesswork in the final result.
Did they map Cisco logo on it aswell?
geeks using a networking analogy to describe the brain.
sounds as lame as senators using a tubes analogy to describe the internet.
nooge.
You already have a yotabyte switch. All you need is an upgrade to the BS detector ROM.
...that may cause legislators to bring back death penalty. ...at least those who survived the eyes-bleeding.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Looks like how my head feels after 10 hours solid maintainig legacy code...
I'd like to see the maps of both the male and the female brain. The female brain is smaller but has a larger hub between the RH and LH of the brain. That is why females can think of many things at ones. Another big difference between males and females is that males fixate all the power of their brains on a single thing, while females spread the power of their brain of many things. So the male and the female brain must differ a lot. It should be quite interesting to compare both brain maps.
Here be signatures
There is a theory of conciousness that can get some support from this hub thingy.
Basically, why are we conscious? Apart from the world becoming much more boring it should be some kind of biological advantage to evolve that way.
The theory states that consciousness is similar to a theater. With only one stage and one focus of light.
Attendants to the play are all the brain subsystems.
Actors are all the subconscious process wanting to become conscious (the current inputs of senses , memory, etc.). They compete for the focus of light.
When one of them get the focus, all the attendants can see him so it becomes and input for the other modules of the brain.
So, conscious process are slower and it takes much more resources, but allows to broadcast information to anyone. It can be modeler like a hub, isn't it?
...Prof. C. McGinn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McGinn) Quote: ...He goes on to point out that "if one could know everything about your brain of a neural kind ...its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments ...the position of every atom and its subatomic structure ...everything that that materialist says your mind is, do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind, I know nothing about which conscious states you are in ... and what those states feel like to you ... knowledge of the brain does not give me knowledge of your mind. How then can the two be said to be identical?"...(The Mysterian Manifesto: Shakespeare, McGinn and Me, http://www.observer.com/node/43473)
Can't decide whether this is great news or not.
On the one hand, it should give AI research some inspiration on how to interface various AI functions.
On the other hand, there's the slacker nature of evolution. Is the human brain really the _best_ we can do? The paradigm might set back AI theorizing for decades.
Isn't this topology patented? Are we all going to have to pay royalties to Al Gore to use our brains?
> Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may
> be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
Important, yes. Key to the Big Picture, i.e. consciousness? Doubtful. Your brain is really two brains, each lobe capable of thought and consciousness without the other. People can and do have hemispherectomies, believe it or not, and still remain conscious.
I wonder if anyone like this ever understood AI and could describe the experience, though.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm always surprised by the apparent discontinuity between the sort of AI research that goes on in computer science departments (where "connectionism" is a dirty word), and the fact that a lot of modern neuroscientists seem to think that we'll solve a lot of the brain by figuring out the connections.
And, honestly, I don't think that DSI/DTI is really going to give us very much insight beyond bulk connectionism. When I spoke to Walter Schneider at a Neuromorphic computing workshop this past April, he told me that these sorts of processes operate at at a resolution around a tenth of a millimeter. While that's good for determining the highways of the brain, you can't very well figure out how a steel mill works by looking at a map its delivery trucks follow.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I'm no brain-scientist, but I imagine 'upgrading' to a GigE switch (as you put it) would more likely be a downgrade.
Protect the queen!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The article is really light on details, yes IRTFA. It describes its use of a "highly sensitive MRI variant, called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), to depict the orientation of multiple fibers that cross a single location." So what they found was the highways or major paths that neuronal axons use when they "cross a single location". Sporns said. "We can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do." This is like saying that since we know what highways connect between certain cities we can now predict what the cities will do. There was no mention of the primitive brain, "limbic system", or how that system connects to and interacts with the cortex or how this interaction fits into their findings. Don't get me wrong, this information is significant importance, especially for neurosurgeons, neurosurgery intervention and brain injury assessment, especially if these patterns prove to have a degree of consistency in a large scale study.
Why, mine of course...
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub. I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?
Cybermen will remove fear. Cybermen will remove sex, and class, and color, and creed. You will become identical. You will become like us.
Begin upgrading.
They used huge gradients (twice the usual maximum value)
Brains....
that may be a downgrade...
I am amused by the way slashdot automatically tries to relate this to a computer network. I would love to see the analogies they use on the following sites:
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
I say that VERY tongue-in-cheek, being a high-tech manager myself.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies