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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?"
all running round robin =)
Come on, you know it's coming.
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
I thought Control was located somewhat further south.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
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.
Their newly mapped "medial and parietal cortex hub" is pretty close to the pineal gland, after all :).
Now we just need to figure out how to perform a denial of service attack.
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)
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.
You need to read more:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=459006&cid=22476564
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235007&cid=19155051
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235329&cid=19192413
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=375275&cid=21531939
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=274687&cid=20298559
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
...and you probably graduated first in your class only to become the friendless office psychopath. Ya know, the one guy who's the reason why the employees are no longer allowed to play music or have eye-contact with each other.
Pull the stick out of your ass and learn to take a fucking joke.
Hell, let's make it entertaining while we're at it, equip them with guns and send out guards in funny themed suits to hunt them down. Maybe use a CGI representation of that guy who hosted Family Fued to MC the whole event.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these... Wait, isn't that basically a "Think Tank"?
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
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.
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)
GP started typing that post a few weeks ago.
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.
Beavis: (clutching heart) My liver! My liver!
Butt-Head: Uhhh.... lower down, dude.
Beavis: (clutching nads) My liver! My liver!
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.
Kickstart? If I was from Control it'd have already become a meme.
I'm no brain-scientist, but I imagine 'upgrading' to a GigE switch (as you put it) would more likely be a downgrade.
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.