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A Nanoscale Look At a Complete Fly Brain (cemag.us)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Controlled Environments Magazine: Two high-speed electron microscopes. 7,062 brain slices. 21 million images. For a team of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, these numbers add up to a technical first: a high-resolution digital snapshot of the adult fruit fly brain. Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.
The fruit fly brain, roughly the size of a poppy seed, contains about 100,000 neurons (humans have 100 billion). Each neuron branches into a starburst of fine wires that touch the wires of other neurons. Neurons talk to one another through these touchpoints, or synapses, forming a dense mesh of communication circuits. Scientists can view these wires and synapses with an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy. First, they infuse the fly's brain with a cocktail of heavy metals. These metals pack into cell membranes and synapses, ultimately marking the outlines of each neuron and its connections. Then the researchers hit slices of the brain with a beam of electrons, which passes through everything except the metal-loaded parts. "It's the same way that x-rays go through your body except where they hit bone," Bock explains. The resulting images expose the brain's once-hidden nooks and crannies.
The fruit fly brain, roughly the size of a poppy seed, contains about 100,000 neurons (humans have 100 billion). Each neuron branches into a starburst of fine wires that touch the wires of other neurons. Neurons talk to one another through these touchpoints, or synapses, forming a dense mesh of communication circuits. Scientists can view these wires and synapses with an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy. First, they infuse the fly's brain with a cocktail of heavy metals. These metals pack into cell membranes and synapses, ultimately marking the outlines of each neuron and its connections. Then the researchers hit slices of the brain with a beam of electrons, which passes through everything except the metal-loaded parts. "It's the same way that x-rays go through your body except where they hit bone," Bock explains. The resulting images expose the brain's once-hidden nooks and crannies.
No animals were harmed in the making of this study.
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And yet the fly adapts to so many different situations, flies,"eats", copulates etc.... that emphasizes how powerful the 3D brain structure is, and how our current AI is not.
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It has about 300 neurons, 1000 cells all up (so about a third are neurons). Its connectome (wiring diagram) has been known for decades, and unlike human brains is identical in each worm. But how it actually thinks remains a mystery.
So good work to understand a fruit fly, and no doubt useful. But do not mistake it for understanding.
While understanding neurons might be helpful for building an AI, I think it is unlikely that an AI will be any direct mapping. Aeroplanes are not built out of feathers.
Ah, both kinds of music!
"Fly Brain" does sound like it could be the name of a heavy metal band, doesn't it?
"Fat Girls Taking Dumps" would also be a great band name
--- Trevor Moore
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Brain size and IQ are not necessarily correlated.
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(among humans at least)
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I think I might just wait for a less lethal method.
You'd be programmed to not notice the difference.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Actual size!
*Looks at label on the brain jar*
"Abby Normal... what a nice name for a fruit fly. I'll use this brain."
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"The Insane Fruit Flys" would be a good name for a band except for the possibility of mispronunciation "Insane Fruit Fries" or "Insane Foot Fries".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
This article, and the description of what they have to go through just to map a paltry 1x10^5 neurons (as compared to the 1x10^11 in a human brain), is an excellent example of one of the problems with understanding how a biological brain, like humans posess, produces phenomena like sentience, self-awareness, cognition, and real ability to think. For starters, they can't map it without killing the host first, because they have to dismantle the brain in order to map it. Furthermore, since a living brain is extremely fluid and dynamic in it's operating state, mapping it statically just gives you a snapshot, it doesn't show you all the dynamics of how it actually operates. If we want to be able to truly unlock the mysteries of how our own brain works, we need better instrumentality to give us the means to both map the neuronal connections and see the entire brain operating in realtime, without having to kill the host and dismantle the brain in the first place. Until then we're just shooting in the dark with the current approach to artificial intelligence, which is why it's so weak compared to a biological brain.
The world depicted in Ghost in the Shell is approaching