4 ms·

> low-cost recording technologies that are easy to use, such as the Neuropixels probes I'm going to withhold my belief that it's going to go bonkers due to thi

> low-cost recording technologies that are easy to use, such as the Neuropixels probes I'm going to withhold my belief that it's going to go bonkers due to this technology. Things go bonkers when they're useful to people and money is behind it. Neuropixel probes require the scientist to shove silicon into a brain to measure it. So, not very useful for people. If we figured out cheap low temperature superconductors, and everyone courd afford an fMRI machine at home, that would be bonkers. With that said, I think brain research is ready to blossom. We now have proven models for neural nets, and the compute capacity is getting there. The problem is that it is still too expensive (cost, signal/noise, physical discomfort) to reliably read (complex) brains.

throwaway2048 8y ago
Neural nets have an unfortunate name, and only superficially resemble how brains work. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-neural-networks-like-brain/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-neural-ne...
kkylin 8y ago
I don't know anything about neuropixels (added that Nature paper to my queue), so don't know if they live up to the hype. That said, the standard tool in many electrophysiology experiments are still tetrodes and variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrode_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrode_(biology)), which can at best record a few to several cells at a time, within a small radius of the recording tip. Simultaneously recording from hundreds to thousands of cells in multiple brain areas would probably yield quite a bit of valuable data. Also, non-invasive techniques like fMRI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_...) tend to have relatively poor spatial resolution, and track signals that correlate with neural activity (e.g., blood flow) rather than actual electrical activity. Since nearby neurons do not always encode the same information or perform the same function, a spatially-averaged signal isn't going to be as informative.

throwaway2048 8y ago

Neural nets have an unfortunate name, and only superficially resemble how brains work. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-neural-networks-like-brain/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-neural-ne...

kkylin 8y ago

I don't know anything about neuropixels (added that Nature paper to my queue), so don't know if they live up to the hype. That said, the standard tool in many electrophysiology experiments are still tetrodes and variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrode_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrode_(biology)), which can at best record a few to several cells at a time, within a small radius of the recording tip. Simultaneously recording from hundreds to thousands of cells in multiple brain areas would probably yield quite a bit of valuable data. Also, non-invasive techniques like fMRI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_...) tend to have relatively poor spatial resolution, and track signals that correlate with neural activity (e.g., blood flow) rather than actual electrical activity. Since nearby neurons do not always encode the same information or perform the same function, a spatially-averaged signal isn't going to be as informative.