Pretty interesting. 548,000 connections seems pretty low to me thinking of the complex behaviour these animals are capable of. And this shows that there's a lo

Pretty interesting. 548,000 connections seems pretty low to me thinking of the complex behaviour these animals are capable of. And this shows that there's a lot of elements that we are lacking in our approach to artificial intelligence; I guess for one, although we say 548k connections each of these connections is modulated in many ways. Two neurons can communicate through different chemicals which in turn will result in different reactions. When one neuron fires a signal to the next neuron there is a lot that goes on in the receiver to either trigger or not trigger the response. Type of neurotransmitter, amount of neurotransmitter, previous signals that the neuron has received, amount of times the neuron has fired in the past; as well as other environmental factors. This means just one synapse between two neurons is actually an extremely complex model of interaction in itself... it's a very non linear process that's modulated by countless complex relationships. This is really great work because it gives a light on distributions of neurons (despite all the complexity, it's still possible to group and classify neurons) and this could be used to generate new artificial neural networks that might share some of this complexity. Though, I haven't really been following artificial neural network research so I imagine they already are doing similar things. Great stuff, thanks for sharing.