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MIT Crowdsources and Gamifies Brain Analysis
MrSeb writes "There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. Starting small and working its way up, MIT today launched Eyewire, a crowdsourced 'game' that tasks users with wiring up the neurons in a mouse's retina. A future stage of the game will get users to find the synapses, too."
Neither. The average for an adult is ~1400 grams, which according to Google is ~3 pounds.
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Which makes it perfect. Try this new approach on the eye, because you already know what results you should get. If what comes out is completly wrong, you know the method has failed. If it mostly-matches what is already known then the method is validated, and it's time to try something a little more unfamiliar.
Your entire head weighs closer to 9 or 10 pounds. The brain is closer to about 3 or so.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Except that no one's brain has ever been "filled" up. And in any case, no one individual needs to fully understand it, just as no one individual knows every step in making a car from raw material to finished product. It's divided into multiple niches so that some individuals understand how to mine iron ore, make windshields, design new parts, assemble engines, etc. We as a species understand plenty of things no one individual understands.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Include Neocons and it drops down to 1.75 kg.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
You and one of your follow-up posters suggested that the eye was basically too simple to try this technique on. This is not correct. The eye contains the retina, which is actually a part of the brain. It's a sort of small computer in the eye that, for example, calculates motion direction. Understanding how this works is cutting edge research, to which this technique has already contributed: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7337/full/nature09818.html
On a more general note, acquiring these datasets takes a long time. Tracing the connections takes even longer. And there's a limit on how big they can get, which is a fraction of a millimeter along each edge. These things taken together put pretty strong constraints on what parts of the brain you should look at. Most of them will contain circuits that are too big to image or too big to reconstruct or both. This is why these guys have chosen to start with something simple, where they knew in advance that interesting circuits would be contained in the very small volume.
Disclaimer: I work in the field.
I get what you're trying to say, but that's not how the brain stores information from what I understand. There is a particular connection, for instance, with 5,000 nerves. It allows more than 5,000 signals to propagate through it since it is factorial. 5,000! or 5,000 factorial is a finite number, but vast beyond imagining. This is why our brains don't "fill up" like your water bottle analogy. There is no reason why our brain couldn't understand what a brain does and how it works, your bad analogies notwithstanding.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
So it starts with 1.1 kg and then it drops to 1.75 kg?
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neocon's brains are the same size as anyone else's. They just don't use them much.