Study of neural linkages in mouse visual cortex ushers in the age of 'connectomics'
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comScientists find way to map brain's complexity
Seeded on Sun Apr 10, 2011 3:51 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
— Filed under: health
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....this and cosmology and the new nanunanoparticle...I have a bridge in Brooklyn for small money that I can let you have if you act fast...
Hahaha! Tell me another! I love good jokes!
Don't be such a skeptic!
How long could it possibly take to trace down 150 trillion connections by hand? After that, all we have to do is decode the logic.
By the way, I found a way to get to Alpha Centauri.
Hint: it involves stacking rocks...
Important research. It may unlock the cures for many psychiatric disorders. I hope they tread carefully - it could also unleash a slew of ethical problems of Orwellian proportions. We are our brains and this could change who we are.
Great, they should collaborate with the blue brain project. Twenty, thirty years from now the brain will be old news once we start making better brains.
Brain 2.0 sp3
A mouse might see something but how do you know what it thinks about it? My guess is that the neurons hold the memory(s) and the dendrites provide the sense of what they mean. I also believe that our dreams are the mapping of experience into our long term memory with the pathways by which it can be found. Recurrent nightmares are the failure to map an irrational or traumatic event. I'll bet some dendrites form as we develop our brains as a fetus and that is where the answer to the nature vs nurture question will be found. Instinct (which may also be passed on in part by the neurons). Those dendrites that are not stimulated wither away and the environment thickens the "needed" ones. The choice of the neuron to store a particular memory may be determined by the dendrite pathway(s) that is/are in use at the time providing a convenient orderliness where adjacent neurons would "logically" be interconnected.
Seems to me that this has less of a payoff than the payoff the GENOME project was supposed to have. Surely this is a good endeavor that should provide longterm job security to whomever works on this project.
This could lead the way to strong A.I and replacing the biological brain with a new and improved one after we learned everything from the brain, saw all it's faults and improved them in every aspect. Look up memristors and the blue brain project. These obscure works are leading up to either strong A.I, prosthetic brains or both and they are beginning to converge. Also, we learned alot from the genome project and still have much to learn.To say no benefit has come from it is ludicrous.
Thankfully, I said no such thing... the payoff so far has not been anywhere close to what it was envisioned.
and not only that but we also found fossilized bacteria on Mars! Can you beat that!! These are the guys that would benefit from neuron mapping to try and figure out why they are looking for the unfindable and trying to learn the unknowable
Mapping pathways in any one brain is a very cool concept, however, we might expect other brains to have very different pathways and connections based upon right/left brain characterisitics (artistic vs. logical interpretations) and levels of neurotransmitters and underlying disease processes that include trauma, diseases, medications and genetic differences. While our knowledge base is growing by leaps and bounds, potential applications for the most serious disease processes may still be decades away.