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Map of an Insect’s Brain

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#91

Post by meindnoch »

epgui wrote: post #80
actionfromafar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not totally true even for knees. Artificial replacement knees aren't as good as original knees.

I’d argue they’re better (in some ways), given that they’re “dead” material as opposed to functional tissue. Human knees don’t last nearly as long when the tissue is dead.

Lol. That's an interesting definition of "better".

If you're active, knee implants have to be replaced after 15-20 years, because they detach from the bone. Knee implants can harbor pockets of infections because they don't have an immune system. They are also more prone to dislocations.

They are objectively inferior to a healthy organic knee.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#92

Post by moonbreams »

notfed wrote: post #21
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's no citation, but I am assuming it's this: "A searchable image resource of Drosophila GAL4-driver expression patterns with single neuron resolution. eLife, 2023; 12 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.80660"

That's a different paper announcing a large repository of genetic expression patterns. This is the link for the connectome announcement: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9330

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#93

Post by moonbreams »

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…

The sell with this kind of research is that doing it will lead to order of magnitude gains in complexity - compare the time it took to sequence the first fruit fly genome with the time it takes today

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#94

Post by moonbreams »

causality0 wrote: post #7

With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made. It's an impressive achievement but I'm not sure I'd call that a whole brain. It's a larval proto-brain with less than 4% the neurons of an adult fly.

larvae behave, they learn, they forage, they do have a brain.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#95

Post by yourapostasy »

Groxx wrote: post #46
yyyk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

For some more context / concrete links: there are ongoing efforts to simulate the C. elegans worm, e.g. https://openworm.org/ , which has ~300 neurons. The actual precision of this model is: nobody knows, because nobody knows precisely what neurons do / what they react to. We know some of it but definitely not all. But, simulating what we do know, you get quite worm-like behavior, despite whatever flaws exist. To get…

An average cell contains an estimated 100 trillion atoms. I’m guessing to “just” simulate elegans’ 302 neurons at the atomic not to speak of quantum precision, is not within our compute capabilities yet. Until then, we’ll have to content ourselves with rather crude approximations of simulations. I’m not entirely convinced on a gut feel level that the current GPT (multimodal or not) AI will necessarily lead to AGI when we don’t even know how the biological equivalent works to the molecular chemistry level. Though I really hope I’m blind to a possibility and we hit the friendly Culture Minds-like AGI jackpot without having to first understand the biophysical mechanics of our own biological sapience.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#96

Post by redox99 »

jll29 wrote: post #39
jokoon wrote: post #28

I wish AI scientists would try to work on this instead of machine learning.

Machine learning has much more humble goals: fitting a bunch of data to a curve. Despite all the hype around chatGPT, I have yet to see any model that asks me a question (without being programmed to do so). Today, my son asked me out of the blue: "Why do people write on paper?" and "What are our walls made of?" and "Why don't we paint our house yellow?". I don't care to live extraordinarily long, but I'd give my righ…

LLMs ask questions without being programmed to do so.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#97

Post by kerpotgh »

coldtea wrote: post #50
simonh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really believe we’d be better off doing no machine learning research at all?

Machine learning? We'd be better off with way less technology in general... if we manage to survive tech induced climate change and/or potential nuclear annihilation without billions dying that is...

[dead]

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#98

Post by stevenjgarner »

Is it reasonable to expect that as this science progresses, it will progressively map out more complex connectomes? So the connectomes of nematodes and sea squirts have only a few hundred neurons each; and a fruit fly larva has 3,016 neurons with 548,000 synapses; and humans have 86 billion neurons with hundreds of trillions of synapses; is the expectation that brain maps will progressively be made of animals that have:

10k neurons - e.g. leech [1]

100k neurons - e.g. lobster [1]

1M neurons - e.g. cockroach [1]

10M neurons - e.g. zebrafish [1]

100M neurons - e.g. mole-rat [1]

1G neurons - e.g. buzzard [1]

10G neurons - e.g. giraffe [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#99

Post by stevenjgarner »

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…

Synapses of neurons change over time due to synaptic plasticity. This process is responsible for allowing learning and memory. Synaptic plasticity occurs through a combination of changes in the number of synapses and the strength of those synapses. So these brain maps are like a single frame still image frozen in time taken from a video of the changing connectome.

Re: Map of an Insect’s Brain

#100

Post by abudabi123 »

epgui wrote: post #80
actionfromafar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not totally true even for knees. Artificial replacement knees aren't as good as original knees.

I’d argue they’re better (in some ways), given that they’re “dead” material as opposed to functional tissue. Human knees don’t last nearly as long when the tissue is dead.

You should be able to relocate the instruction pointers in the stem cell's dna to patch in place the original knee with new living original knee.

Hope that reality isn't 50-years or more into the distant future.

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