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Activity of Whole Fish Brains Mapped Second To Second
ananyo writes "Researchers have imaged an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single neurons for the first time. A team of scientists based at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, were able to record activity across the whole brain of a fish embryo almost every second, detecting 80% of its 100,000 neurons. The work is a first step towards mapping the activity of a whole human brain — which contains about 85,000 times more neurons than the zebrafish brain. The imaging system relies on a genetically engineered zebrafish (Danio rerio). The fish's neurons make a protein that fluoresces in response to fluctuations in the concentration of calcium ions, which occur when nerve cells fire. A microscope sends sheets of light rather than a conventional beam through the fish's brain, and a detector captures the signals like a viewer watching a cinema screen. The system records activity from the full brain every 1.3 seconds."
"Oh look, a hook!"
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Each hour-long experiment generated 1 terabyte of data and they were able to detect 80% of the 100k neurons in the fish's brain. So that works out to 1 terabyte $\div$ 1 hour * (3600 seconds/hour) / (1.3 seconds / data item) / (80000 neurons) = 4513 bytes per neuron in the dataset.
Run that as
perl -e "print 1e12/(2769.23077)/(.8*1e5)"; echo 4513.88888763503I wonder how much faster the ata really needs to be captured in order to get as much resolution as needed to understand what's going on.
This is like taking slices of 80% of a computer's memory once a second. Sure, you might be able to get an idea of what's going on, but until you can see the whole picture, a lot of things are not going to make sense...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Since these techniques rely on bio luminescence, can the light generated from the neural activity travel to and stimulate the retinal cells? Can the animal... see itself thinking?
http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/ in action.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Not apparent from the (cool) video they linked to is that according to the paper in Nature (yes I RTFA and I followed a link) they say they achieved cellular resolution (the video must be a down-sampled version). This would explain them collecting 1TB of data for each 1 hour "run". Another neat thing to notice is that their data is 3D, they are collecting volumetric data (as you can see from the video "slice") and explained in a previous paper. Impressive! Now if only they could increase the temporal resolution (multiple parallel scanning beams?) we could really see how a fish thinks!
They say they could collect data from (currently small) sections of mammalian brains but it would require surgery. I wonder how soon until we see monkeys with their skulls replaced with transparent plastic or glass? Maybe they could use (a very advanced version of this) on patients undergoing brain surgery.
By the way, are there any transparent plastics that are suitable for 3D printing? Biocompatible? I can see a time when some really crazy performance artist replaces his/her skull with a transparent one. I guess they would have to wear a hat whenever they went out into the sun though.
Nice work. I look forward to see the 1 millisecond time reolution. The researchers state that the human brain contain 85000*100000 -> 8.5 billion neurons. Most textbooks says the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. There are also papers out telling that the neocortex of a young male contain about 22.8 billion neurons (Pakkenberg). So the human brain is much more complex than stated.
Let me guess... Linux user?
And the cat:
Huh. Forcefield. Huh. Forcefield. Huh. Forcefield? Huh! Forcefield.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.