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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?"
Overnight being the last 14 years.
It comes from
Deep Space Homer, an episode of the simpsons that first aired on February 24, 1994.
Spoiler:
When in space Homer flies into the Ant colony, breaking it open sending Ants everywhere. The ants make it onto the camera. Since the ants are so close to the camera, they appear very large. Kent Brockman (the Simpsons news anchor) then says "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords".
The more you know(tm)
You need to read more:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=459006&cid=22476564
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http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133979&cid=11182047
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223584&cid=18105912
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=556424&cid=23451196
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by this, but I'm not sure I have it. If you meant the hub metaphor the whole way, then no that isn't how it works. If all messages went to all destinations, you can imagine how difficult it would be to make any sense of them. Further, when an area receives input, it is not a stateless message. It is received in a state of "sensitivity" (for lack of a more detailed explanation) and the fact that it is received in its state also alters the local state for future messages. The easiest example is sensory desensitization... like when you no longer smell that horrible smell once you've been in the sysadmin's office for a few minutes. The same destinations are getting the same inputs, but the local state has changed due to previous inputs and therefore there is a different result.
So you can see that if all destinations got all inputs the brain would basically "white out" and be useless. The fact is that there is a very specific network structure. Each local network has projections into other local networks, which is why emotions and different sensory modalities have impacts on each other and on other "unrelated" areas of the brain.
It's from the movie Get Smart
From TFA: "The study examined the brains of FIVE human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques..."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
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.
The influx of "If I was from Control" posts is CDMA_Demo's effort to single-handedly kickstart a new meme:
http://slashdot.org/~CDMA_Demo