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A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex
- KhoomeiK 5y agoIt's simply a matter of scaling this slice-scan-render technique up to the entirety of a human brain to simulate human thinking, correct? What're the biggest technological hurdles left?
- danielmorozoff 5y agopretty much everything. Connectome != functional understanding of the brain. We have had c elegans ( worm) and more recently fly connectomes for years. we are still struggling to understand basic logic encodings in those animal models. Imho we lack a foundational understanding of the logic encoding mechanisms in the brain. Many neuroscientists/ computer scientists are working on this problem, but to my knowledge we are still not there.
- mementomorti 5y agoMy understanding of this is that the connectome itself wouldn't be sufficient to simulate human thinking. If I understand correctly the connectome would basically be a map of each neuron to its connections, somewhat like a wiring diagram. However, I've heard that it's more realistic to regard each neuron as being more like a computer rather than a wire. Neurons have a lot of state to be accounted for, for example methylated groups controlling the expression of DNA and the resulting amounts and types of various receptors which would influence their control.
- hyperpallium2 5y agoSeems we can't yet simulate a 302 neuron worm brain (C. elegans) despite having its connectome, so not correct. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm
- londons_explore 5y agoDo all of these worms use exactly 302 neurons for locomotion? Or is 302 just the number found in a specific worm that was disected?
- hoseja 5y agoSpecifically 302. Each worm has the same brain, down to the cell.
- dx7tnt 5y ago
- api 5y agoPhotographing a bird doesn’t automatically tell you how to fly. It does give you some hints though.
- mattkrause 5y agoThere are interactions that the wiring diagram doesn't account for. For example, some neurons release "neuromodulators" that diffuse beyond their immediate synaptic partners. Electric fields produced by a fiber bundle can affect activity in neighboring neurons. Inside the cell, there are all kinds of processes on short (millisecond) and long (day) timescales that alter how the same neuron responds to identical stimuli.
- lawrenceyan 5y agoThe dataset the paper uses: 1.4 petabyte browsable reconstruction of the human cortex - https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html
- epgui 5y agoThis is incredible work!
- blamazon 5y agoAmusing how they (minimally) protected the identity of the individual standing on a roller chair in the main illustration.
- matthewfcarlson 5y agoThere was a story I read once where general AI was unobtainable but computing power continued so simulations of brains was done via processing brain slices. So every AI was just a person who had died with an intact brain that could be preserved. Self driving cars were a thing but it was someone’s grandma.
- klysm 5y agoHow is that different from general AI though?
- quocanh 5y agoIt would be General Intelligence but it's probably not Artificial General Intelligence in so much as the intelligence aspect wasn't designed and created. It also wouldn't be able to get smarter at the rate of singularity since its intelligence comes from using humans as raw material.
- robbedpeter 5y agoGeneral ai would be a unique mind. Simulation doesn't require engineers to understand the process, just that the process works. I can copy a mechanism without scientifically understanding what that mechanism is doing. I can follow a recipe or instructable or copy grandma's brain and have little to no understanding of what's really happening. Then again, if you can copy a genius researcher and put a million of the minds to work on solving agi methodically, you don't need precision and understanding to start with. You just hope the million mind genius collective doesn't lie or mislead.
- klysm 5y agoBut the inputs to the simulation are still artificial so I don’t see why it really matters.
- spartanatreyu 5y agoIt absolutely matters. Emulating a human mind means copying all off its flaws, biases, and values. An emulated mind probably won't want to nuke the Earth whereas an artificially created and constructed general intelligence may have no qualms in killing both itself and everyone else around it.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoPerhaps someone has been reading Anders Sandberg[1]? 1. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf
- yayr 5y agois there a more recent comprehensive report? the link above is from 2008.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoI don't think so. He's published stuff with them since [1] but not on the same topic. 1. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/reports/ https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/reports/
- The_rationalist 5y ago
- josemanuel 5y agoWas this done for the first time? Is there any novel technology that enabled this? Why are these studies rare?
- boznz 5y agoI've often wondered about the talk of always needing 10,000 x more processing power before we can emulate something like the human brain, seems to me it should be possible now but running at 10,000th of the speed. I would still be impressed.
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoNothing constrains it to a linear relationship, existing compute hardware is essentially single-threaded but neurons are massively parallel. If you need to iterate through an O(n^2) algorithm over 1.4 PB and the brain can do it in O(1) then you still need an absurd level of processing power to get back to 1:10000.
- nynx 5y agoThis is fantastic progress. There’s two directions of attack that are necessary to get brain emulation. First, scanning ability needs to advance enough to scan an entire brain with various stains at the decananometer voxel level. Second, we still don’t know enough about how neural cells in the brain function. Just recently, glial cells like astrocytes we’re recognized to have a significant effect on signaling and the entropy of neural activity. I expect more and more learnings from neuroscience will slowly work their way into the field of neuromorphic computing and eventually we’ll have a complete picture. Source: doing my undergrad thesis on neuromorphic computing.
- akomtu 5y agoI feel like the brain complexity is a mirage, a distraction from the fact that even trivial organisms with few neurons demonstrate quite complex and arguably intelligent behavior, and even single cells demonstrate primitive awareness of their surroundings.
- londons_explore 5y agoThere is a nice "gallery" of cool things found in this dataset viewable in both 3d and the raw electron microscope images side by side: https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/gallery.html https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/gallery.html