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Scientists Begin Mapping the Brain
Raindance writes "A team at the University of Utah has unveiled a system to map and digitize brain tissue — thus fulfilling one of the long-standing holy grails of neuroscience and enabling for the first time in-depth analysis of how mammalian neural networks function. So far, maps for the entire retina and related neural networks have been released; no ETA on a full-brain digital reconstruction yet. (One of the lead authors hangs out here on Slashdot.)"
Maybe I can finally get that direct neural interface I have always wanted :)
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
I can see the inevitable result now. They'll get the whole thing mapped, petabytes of data, the position and connection of every neuron to thousands of other neurons will be known... and they'll be left to say, "now what?"
This may be of use for diseases, but the greatest use - understanding consciousness - is still well beyond simply mapping the brain.
So a while back I was chatting to a maths guy over coffee and we started wondering about the brain. He figured that the average number of synapses between any two purkinje cells was just over three - now that would seem to be pretty interconnected, to the extent that cortical differentiation really isn't all that.
In 500 mm turn right at the Hippocampus, and you have reached your destination.
Seriously, this is pretty cool. Genomics and protenomics are cool, but you have to map the brain to understand it...
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
but I would be more interested in a system to map and digitize vagina tissue.
We shall know where Mankirks' wife is.
Sounds like internal phrenology to me.
The real question is with male subjects which brain are they mapping?
It looks like this method, as others, divide the brain into slices for mapping. Doesn't the slicing of soft tissue make it difficult or impossible to determine the exact point of connection between slices? I imagine it like dividing a plate of spaghetti, and then trying to determine which noodles were connected to which just by looking at their new positions, whereas their previous positions were determined, in part, by the connections themselves, and the slicing process has introduced entropy.
Are the brains frozen into a solid before slicing? If not, how do you preserve the arrangement? If yes, have you had any problems with zombies trying to eat the braincicles?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Without RTFA, this seems silly to me. Great you can map the brain but what real science will be done? What predictions or deeper understandings will be acquired?
Seems like figuring out how a car runs by making a diagram of the engine without know what each part does.
A better title would be, "New computational tools allow scientists to map the brain at a faster rate than previously possible" - because scientists began mapping the brain decades ago.
From the article, it sounds like neurophysiology and the like are finally getting some decent tools with which to automate time consuming and predictable aspects of their work. This is along the lines of what google did for search.
Better tools make the impossible possible.
Didn't google already do that? With streetview? I'm sure I heard a car drive through my cortex the other night.
Singularity
I went through school, being told by science teachers that science really knows squat about the brain and how it works.
Obviously, researchers can't resist a mystery and an intellectual challenge, and I can see why it would be fascinating to try and unravel the mysteries about how the brain works.
I have a question for the neuroscientists however... what's so critically important about this work, to demand the enormous resources being sunk into this?
Do people remember all of the full "usable" gene mappings and correlations that were going to come out of the human genome project? We had smart genes, violence genes, political genes, blah blah blah, even though most of the genes were filler/junk lines of "code", which basically just meant we didn't know WHAT the hell they did. There was even a span of time when bio-med and genetic engineering firms were scrambling to patent various genes and their effects. It all turned out to be mostly a big joke, and I can see the same thing happening with a brain map--a la, "We've found out the part of the brain that makes people stupid! Line up at our testing centers to find out if YOU are a dumbass!"
It's easy. They'll just map the brain of developing embryos at every stage, and see how it all goes together. 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells -- how complicated can it get?
This isn't rocket science.
Dammit! Now my conductive tinfoil hat will backfire!
That which does not kill us makes us... st
The scientists working on this problem suddenly realized they had found something! All were shocked at what their results were showing... Finally, one scientist, almost afraid to face the implications of this great discovery, broke the silence and spoke to his fellow researchers...
"This is... astounding... ...Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
To which one of his colleagues prompty replied:
"I think so, but where are we going to find a duck and a rubber hose at this late hour?"
Bow-ties are cool.
The resolution along the cut axis is shitty. The 70 to 90 nm they cite in the paper is way too low to build comprehensive 3-dimensional reconstructions. They're basically looking at series of 2d pictures. And they're expecting that "crowd-sourcing" the data-analysis is going to produce high-quality reconstructions of _huge_ size. Computer vision algorithms are clearly the way to go here.
This brain mapping would be great if they mapped an autistic brain and compared it to a 'normal' brain.
I want to know if there is a difference in 'architecture' between autistic and normal brains.
then the much bigger task of mapping the interconnections can begin. That should not be more than one or two orders of magnitude harder.
Though transmission electron microscopy (TEM) remains the optimal tool for network mapping, the process of building large serial section TEM (ssTEM) image volumes is rendered difficult by the need to precisely mosaic distorted image tiles and register distorted mosaics. Moreover, most molecular neuronal class markers are poorly compatible with optimal TEM imaging. Our objective was to build a complete framework for ultrastructural circuitry mapping. This framework combines strong TEM-compliant small molecule profiling with automated image tile mosaicking, automated slice-to-slice image registration, and gigabyte-scale image browsing for volume annotation. Specifically we show how ultrathin molecular profiling datasets and their resultant classification maps can be embedded into ssTEM datasets and how scripted acquisition tools (SerialEM), mosaicking and registration (ir-tools), and large slice viewers (MosaicBuilder, Viking) can be used to manage terabyte-scale volumes. These methods enable large-scale connectivity analyses of new and legacy data.
It's basically a set of algorithms brought together and improved upon for interpreting data more quickly. This is a breakthrough in the sense that a CPU today is a "breakthrough" on a CPU ten years ago: old theory, various parts of which have been implemented on high end processors over the years, are now all on that little desktop-class die in front of you - so you can do the things you've already been able to do, but more quickly.
What we have here is a fine achievement, but it's really a feat of software integration - not a biological breakthrough.
Without RTFA, this seems silly to me. Great you can map the brain but what real science will be done? What predictions or deeper understandings will be acquired?
Seems like figuring out how a car runs by making a diagram of the engine without know what each part does.
"Real" science?
I think that astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, and a great many other students of the observational sciences -- including many field biologists and anatomists -- would take offense at that characterization.
Just the ability to observe intricately how the brain is put together first is valuable enough knowledge without tinkering with the thing blindly.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Map this!
Just because the brain map now run on silicon doesn't mean it doesn't have rights. Treating it as a test subject instead of a person is a sure way to wake up skynet or the cylons or that thing from "I have no mouth and I must scream"
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
It seems everyone is too busy being flippant or dismissive towards you, so I will attempt to give you an answer.
1. Neuroscience is considered important in the medical field. The nervous system is important for almost every other bodily function if for no other reason than it is the control and communication system of the body.
2. the brain is one of the least understood of our organs, and arguably, one of the more important ones. Anything we can learn about it helps a lot at this early stage.
3. Scientists/med researchers are people too, and since people have diverse interests and passions, so do the scientists. They gravitate to fields that hold an interest/importance to them. Freedom of choice, etc....there is no pool of researchers and scientists that are assigned fields of study by some group/organization.
4. Because it's there. This is a central drive inherent in humans...to 'boldly go where no man has gone before', and can be attributed to many reasons to do so.
Curiosity, exploration for the thrill or ego(I was first!!!!), need to contribute/help, revenge/righting a perceived wrong...
Yeah, this is all just basic stuff, but can be easily overlooked or taken for granted. On one side(funding) you have special interests, on the other you have researchers with special interests. They have a habit of finding each other.
It gets to be easy to sit back and wonder 'why this and not that' from the outside. Maybe this will help:
(I'm not asking for an answer, just giving food for thought, but it's okay to answer!)
What do you do for a living? What got you into that, and why is it important to you? If not important to you(other than to make a living), then what would you want/like to do? Apply those answers to your question, and you may have an answer.(not trying to be an ass, but it's not an 'easy/one answer' question.
On a more personal note, I'm all for neuroscience to blast forward. At my age, my mind is in the best shape of any of my other 'parts', and I would love to be able to go into a body shop and have my brain transferred(by some means) to a new body. :-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I'd hope that the "one of the lead authors" (isn't there only one lead author?) would correct some of the misstatements in the summary.
The system digitizes the map, not the brain.
Isn't "digitizes" a gratuitous inclusion by now?
Mapping can produce a static picture of a dynamic system. The brain works by changing its structure. Thus, the "functioning" they can discern will be extremely limited. Actual functioning could be mapped by remapping the same brain after learning and such, if the analysis is sufficiently fine grained.
Best guess right now is that there are over 100 billion (100 thousand million in the British system) neurons, and even more glial cells which are implicated in neural function. Interconnection of these is such that no neuron is farther than 6 connections from any other neuron, with an average of 3 connections between. Mapping a system like that is certainly possible. Analyzing that map statistically and understanding it may follow, but only in a limited sense and probably not for some time.
The mapping system may be able to describe the interconnections physically. This will do little to help describe the non-connection interactions of neurons via electrical field effects on nearby but not physically connected dentritic trees.
Despite shortcomings in the summary and possibly in the system itself, it's a fine step forward and could add a nice tool to the brain science tool box.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B