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Map of an Insect’s Brain

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#11

Post by notfed »

abraxas wrote: post #5

Is it simulated to the level where you could give it some visual stimulus and observe the actions it is trying to take? Could it be wired to a remote robotic insect and control it in real time? I've no idea how detailed these simulation projects and if we are months or decades away from doing what I mentioned

This article is fluffy. The original research is titled:

"A searchable image resource of Drosophila GAL4-driver expression patterns with single neuron resolution. eLife, 2023; 12 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.80660"

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#14

Post by notfed »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #6

if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality. How do we know that the computer model of neurons does not have the same internal awareness as the real neurons?

In this case the "map" is simply a set of high-res images, not a computer model. I don't think an image can be aware.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#15

Post by falcor84 »

yyyk wrote: post #8
abraxas wrote: post #5

Is it simulated to the level where you could give it some visual stimulus and observe the actions it is trying to take? Could it be wired to a remote robotic insect and control it in real time? I've no idea how detailed these simulation projects and if we are months or decades away from doing what I mentioned

>Is it simulated to the level where you could give it some visual stimulus and observe the actions it is trying to take? No way. First, this mapping doesn't tell us how the synapses are regulated - if we could 'run' this the weights would stay fixed forever and that's not how a brain works. Second, there must be some neurons dedicated to chemical management, and they'd go haywire unless you found a way to deal with t…

>Lastly, we don't have the computational ability just yet to simulate even the mapping itself.

Could you please explain why not? 548,000 synapses sounds entirely feasible to me.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#16

Post by gptgpp »

abraxas wrote: post #5

Is it simulated to the level where you could give it some visual stimulus and observe the actions it is trying to take? Could it be wired to a remote robotic insect and control it in real time? I've no idea how detailed these simulation projects and if we are months or decades away from doing what I mentioned

Man... I just find neural connectomes so depressing.

It's like looking at the copper wiring on the motherboard, or the pins of the CPU, when what you really want is the logic from the networked gates (transistors).

Yet it seems we are many, many decades away from being able to extract that in any comprehensible or definitive way.

I need to stop reading neuroscience articles. There's always big proclamations, Like "the neural circuitry behind arithmetic has been discovered!" then you dig into the meat and it's mostly guesswork and hypothesis based on correlated activity and connectivity, no logic to be seen.

This paper did blow my mind though, I hope to see more creative stuff like it:

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_...

pdf here:

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900...

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#17

Post by notfed »

kuprel wrote: post #9
GordonS wrote: post #3

> The connectome of the larval fly, published Friday in the journal Science, took 12 years to complete. Imaging a single neuron required about a day... > Human brains have an estimated 86 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses... So, the techniques used for the fly are totally impractical for humans, or presumably any mammal. Anyone know of any developments that may help? Maybe AI could be used to auto…

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” Maybe AI can though

Asking AI to map human brains...what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#18

Post by FrustratedMonky »

notfed wrote: post #14
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #6

if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality. How do we know that the computer model of neurons does not have the same internal awareness as the real neurons?

In this case the "map" is simply a set of high-res images, not a computer model. I don't think an image can be aware.

Guess I need to find source study. This high level article makes it sound like an actual map, not an image. Based on same type of map that has been made of nematode

From article Now, researchers have constructed a detailed map of the neurons and the connections between them in the brain of a larval fruit fly. With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#20

Post by FrustratedMonky »

notfed wrote: post #14
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #6

if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality. How do we know that the computer model of neurons does not have the same internal awareness as the real neurons?

In this case the "map" is simply a set of high-res images, not a computer model. I don't think an image can be aware.

This article overstates it. This mapping is not as detailed as what was done with The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Where they did entire nervous system.
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