5 ms·
Just to clarify, these MRI images looks at white matter, which are mostly bundles of long-range myelinated axons. This is more likely a map of major highways in
by nacc 9y ago
Just to clarify, these MRI images looks at white matter, which are mostly bundles of long-range myelinated axons. This is more likely a map of major highways in the brain (Or really the map of bundles of major highways in the brain, as MRI only has millimeter resolution).
The connectome at the cellular level is massive. I think part of the mouse visual cortical connectome has been mapped out, and the data is on the order of tens of terabytes.
- leemailll 9y agoRetina has been mapped, visual cortex not likely
- aristidb 9y agoThe article indirectly says it's using special MRI machines with much better than millimeter resolution. So I think your first analogy is likely better than your second.
- undershirt 9y agoI think I remember reading that mapping an entire human connectome would require all the world's current storage capacity?
- nwjtkjn 9y agoThis might be naive, but I wonder if the essential part of mouse data could be compressed if only we understood it better.
- vilhelm_s 9y agoThe mouse genome is only 160 megabytes, and contains the instructions for building the brain as well as building everything else, so the "secret sauce" of how to make an intelligent brain should not be extremely large, once you figure out how to do it. :) A lot of the actual connections must be either random, or encoding things the mouse learnt while growing up.
- nikki93 9y agothe "learning" can come from things like the compounds in various food and so on! "learning" is, in a generalized sense, any non-genetically-bootstrapped environment->body information transference...
- chongli 9y agoonly 160 megabytes Take a bunch of source code. Compile it, obfuscate it, compress it, and encrypt it with AES such that the result is a 160MB blob. Now see how long it takes to figure out what it does, given a computer that costs a lot of money just to load your program and a long time to give you a result. The upper bound on the complexity of DNA as it relates to the complete expression of an organism phenotype is insanely high.
- dunk010 9y agoMost developers think of the genome like a big load of source code, and if only we could work out where the if and for statements were we could read it. This is an extremely naive and overconfident point of view; the analogy between source code and genomes is very poor. The genome is coding for proteins (by way of RNA). Those proteins are subject to all of physics (think: electrostatics, hydrophobics, ....), whereas your code is an abstract entity designed to run on a rather simple analogue of a Turing machine. The complexity of life is much harder I am afraid. Though that never seems to stop developers assuming that they can create a crude analogy which explains it. Also, the size is totally wrong; see previous comment.
- josefx 9y ago> whereas your code is an abstract entity designed to run on a rather simple analogue of a Turing machine. I cannot adequately put the insane laugh required as response to that into text form. So I will only write this and be just as right: going by physics the brain of a mouse can be adequately approximated by a perfect sphere.
- dunk010 9y ago
- agumonkey 9y agoTB of raw data but could it be structured and "compressed" logically ?