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Whole Human Brain Mapped In 3D
ananyo writes "An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety. The atlas, called 'BigBrain,' shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies (abstract). The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 10 terabytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue."
After that procedure of mapping her brain, did she recover well? were there any side effects? When will we have the first interviews?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
to figure out a route between what I want to say and my speech centers
10 terabytes? The entropy for the entire human body is about 700 megabytes as per DNA, surely there must be a lower order of complexity than that in the brain?
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Maybe this will help fix some of our wetware bugs.
Now someone needs to boot a simulation of that brain up on a super computer and see what it does.
Boy is she going to be surprised once she wakes up inside of a full brain emulation program.
Should have this wrapped up in a few centuries.
I always worry when such notions arise. After all, everyone has a slightly different brain. some people have entire regions and functions mapped to areas we thought were science fiction just a decade or two ago. (typically the result of serious childhood brain trauma)
For all we know her brain might differ from the norm, or her regional background might produce a similar anomaly. We'll need many thousands more of such scans.
While this is and should be a celebrated achievement we must keep in mind that microscopically accurate scans will most likely be required on a per individual basis.
Perhaps in the future we'll all carry our own 10PB brain map in our sub-dermal biochips.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Now that they got the procedure I hope they do that with Einstein's brain and, after that, let it rest in peace with the rest of the body. That is assuming that the cellular structure is still intact after half a century inside a jar. Then delete IBM watson and instead install the observed model along side an appropriate bio-physic-chemical engine on the hardware and we can finally enjoy the new age of singularity and no need to think anymore.
It would be just as or even more useful to have this 3D tool available for the commonly used animal models in research. Given the cost to do just one single brain, it won't be feasible to analyze healthy brains vs brain suffering from disease X. Even if it was feasible, identifying anatomical abnormalities in disease provides limited insight into the mechanism of the disease... these things are sorted out with other techniques that require the use of animal models. I think this is a nice teaching tool for med/health science students but has limited benefit otherwise.
Consider for a moment that were possible. Probably not today, at some point if driver software could be written to run this digital model. If by some long shot it were possible would it be ethically right? What if there were some sense of awareness, personality, fear of the strange circumstances she now finds herself in? She would be without her senses and without any level of input from the outside that she would relate to as a normal person.
And then consider: Is it right to turn such a system on and off like any other computer?
...who else is hungry for cold cuts?
Anyone? Anyone?
Just me, then.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Yeah, and Einstein's brain in a computer does nothing all day but bemoan his lack of arms to play the violin and ears to listen to music. He was more than a theoretical physicist.
MineCraft map. Just add some viruses, white and red blood cells, and a little submarine.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
... after running it through gzip?
No, the cellular structure isn't intact. And it's not intact for the brain mentioned in TFA. A quick glimpse of the sections indicates that they were stained in a variant of the hemotoxylin / eosin stain - one use commonly in light microscopy but one that doesn't even preserve structure at electron microscopy levels, much less biochemically useful levels of detail.
Remember, the process is something like this: Dead person - checked two or three times to make sure they're dead. No brain function. Drain blood, likely embalm the person (in formaldehyde, a very potent protein cross linking chemical that stops virtually all chemical reactions). Cut out brain. Go through a number of other steps to preserve (ie, stop biochemical reactions), soak the brain in wax then slice it nice and thin. Profit! (or more likely, work your butt off for a couple of years going through all those slices).
So, what you are seeing is a protein-crosslinked husk. It's not functional.
Now, the diffusion stuff is really interesting - that's more functional. But it doesn't have the level of structural detail. We will likely get there eventually if we don't blow ourselves back into Medieval times, but we're a long ways away from that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> 7,400 slices
> 1,000 hours
> 10 terabytes of data
> Supercomputers churned away for years
> BigBrain is part of the Human Brain Project, a 10-year,
> €1-billion European initiative to create a supercomputer
> simulation of the human brain
"Done! Wait, hang on. Please tell me this wasn't a murderer's brain?"
"No, this person died in a hospital. 'Abby-someone'."
"Whew."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That is, if the synapses were also preserved in enough detail.
A definite point, even though I don't agree with the grandparent. He's right that energy *IS* a constraining factor. Even worse (currently) is our inability to maintain a nearly closed ecosystem. I suspect that accelerations in space will always be slow, and I suspect that FTL is actually impossible. That still doesn't close off even meat-organisms to space (except that we haven't learned to maintain a nearly closed ecosystem).
Since once you're in orbit, low accelerations suffice to reach any other location in orbit anywhere, the only problem is to maintain sufficient energy flow during the transition (and after you get there). For solar space, out to around the orbit of Jupiter, solar cells should suffice. And there are plenty of asteroids in that area. Beyond, out as far as the Oort clouds, fusion power should suffice. For propulsion the best current technology appears to be to use ion-jets. And you don't economize on living space, because you don't want to go crazy. Also, you need a radiation shield, and you need water anyway, so you carry a sizeable weight of water. This all means that transitions are SLOW. So you'd better have enough people along to keep you sane. 12-13 adults seems about right for a small habitat. Scale upwards as you learn more.
Note that this is all doable TODAY, given the intention, except that we can't maintain a nearly closed ecosystem. And learning to maintain a nearly closed ecosystem can be done (well, mainly) at ground level for cheap prices.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The original publication is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1472
And the database is here: https://bigbrain.loris.ca/main.php
he was a bit of a hound
He was a MAN, baby!
OK. I made one "typo" (well, "though-o"). I mean fission power, rather than fusion, would be enough to get us out to the Oort clouds.
OTOH, the icy moons of Jupiter have too high a gravity to be an attractive choice. You'd need specially designed equipment. Those are no minor masses. Still, there are plenty of icy asteroids beyond Jupiter's orbit.
WRT the Oort clouds...there's a lot of stuff there, but it's rather thinly spread. So figure long transition times between "stops". Probably not practical until we are building habitats the size of cities.
For that matter, it's not wise to focus too tightly on one particular approach. Consider a habitat that's in the shape of a long tube, and that grows by building onto the ends. Perhaps a couple of miles in diameter, though different sections could have different diameters. And spinning, for gravity. Given a long enough tube you can make bends through some pretty sharp angles without causing much stress, though I would design it so that different sections could be safely decoupled, and replaced, removed, or inserted.You'd probably want an occasional non-rotating section. Transport if via electric train, though, so you'd want the sections to be pretty long, to avoid excessive transfers, unless you run the trains in an evacuated tube in the center. Occasionally you'd want an extension to run either straight in or straight out. Power collected at locations near the sun. How far could you find building material to reach? Now use one of the "straight out" constructs as a linear accelerator to launch vehicles to the stars. You should easily have an accelerator 100's of miles long in a vacuum all the way. I'd be a bit hesitatnt, however, about using it to catch incoming freight, even presuming it was designed to do so. Also, you don't want a really high launch velocity, because that would make interstellar material act like really heavy penetrating projectiles. Even a few grams impacting at over 0.5c would be unsurvivable. And though such things are rare, you'd be transiting a HUGE amount of space. So what you want to launch would be habitats designed to eventually go into orbit around some other star. They'd need fission power sufficient to make the trip, with a bit of leeway to allow them to start mining at the arrival end. And they'd need to be travelling at not too far above the local speed of debris, so that they could either dodge it, capture it, or survive the impact. (Lead shielding for impact survival, as the impact would be "supersonic" so crystal strength would be much less important than mass.)
This approach would certainly let us reach the Oort clouds, and live there as long as power held out, but I doubt that there's much fissionable mass available there, so stopping there doesn't seem viable. (Controlled fusion would, of course, change things *quite* significantly, though just how would depend on the machinery required to control it.)
Given a nearly closed ecology there are many approaches to living in space, and which is chosen is more a social choice than an engineering one. (OTOH, there are a lot of ways that just wouldn't work, without "magic technology".)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.