Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 205 posts

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#21

Post by jamiek88 »

nicklecompte wrote: post #14
jamiek88 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god. That is stunning. To think that’s one single millimeter of our brain and look at all those connections. Now I understand why crows can be so smart walnut sized brain be damned. What an amazing thing brains are. Possibly the most complex things in the universe. Is it complex enough to understand itself though? Is that logically even possible?

Crow/parrot brains are tiny but in terms of neuron count they are twice as dense as primate brains (including ours): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... If someone did this experiment with a crow brain I imagine it would look “twice as complex” (whatever that might mean). 250 million years of evolution separates mammals from birds.

Interesting! Thank you. I didn’t know that.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#22

Post by dekhn »

Annual reminder to re-read "There's plenty of room at the bottom" by Feynman. https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

Note the part where the biologists tell him to make an electron microscope that's 1000X more powerful. Then note what technology was used to scan these images.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#23

Post by Zenzero »

g4zj wrote: post #10

Is there a name for the somewhat uncomfortable feeling caused by seeing something like this? I wish I could better describe it. I just somehow feel a bit strange being presented with microscopic images of brain matter. Is that normal?

For me the disorder of it is stressful to look at. The brain has poor cable management.

That said I do get this eerie void feeling from the image. My first thought was to marvel how this is what I am as a conscious being in terms of my "implementation", and it is a mess of fibers locked away in the complete darkness of my skull.

There is also the morose feeling from knowing that any image of human brain tissue was once a person with a life and experiences. It is your living brain looking at a dead brain.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#24

Post by dekhn »

gary17the wrote: post #19
posnet wrote: post #5

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human br…

One point about storage- it's economically driven. If there was a demand signal (say, the government dedicated a few hundred billion dollars to a single storage systems), hard drive manufacturers could deploy much more storage in a year. I've pointed this out to a number of scientists, but none of them could really think of a way to get the government to spend that much money just to store data without it curing a senator's heart disease.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#26

Post by bglazer »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #20
throwup238 wrote: post #12

> The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. This is great and provides a hard data point for some napkin math on how big a neural network model would have to be to emulate the human brain. 150 million synapses / 57,000 neurons is an average of 2,632 synapses per neuron. The adu…

Except you’d be missing the part that a neuron is not just a node with a number but a computational system itself.

Computation is really integrated through every scale of cellular systems. Individual proteins are capable of basic computation which are then integrated into regulatory circuits, epigenetics, and cellular behavior.

Pdf: “Protein molecules as computational elements in living cells - Dennis Bray” https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~basu/Papers/Bray-Protein%20Computing...

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#27

Post by falcor84 »

gary17the wrote: post #19
posnet wrote: post #5

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human br…

I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scanning, but once we do, we may likely discover that a huge portion of it is redundant.

In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade. Lena [0] tells of the first successfully uploaded scan taking place in 2031, and I'm concerned that reality won't be far off.

[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#28

Post by Animats »

nicklecompte wrote: post #17
ignoramous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we manage to annotate this much level of detail about our brain, and then let (some variant of the current) models train on it, will those intrinsically end up generalizing a model for intelligence?

I think you would also need the epigenetic side, which is very poorly understood: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/biologists-trans... We have more detail than this about the C. elegans nematode brain, yet we still no clue how nematode intelligence actually works.

How's OpenWorm coming along?

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#29

Post by bglazer »

g4zj wrote: post #10

Is there a name for the somewhat uncomfortable feeling caused by seeing something like this? I wish I could better describe it. I just somehow feel a bit strange being presented with microscopic images of brain matter. Is that normal?

I’m not religious but it’s as close to a spiritual experience as I’ll ever have. It’s the feeling of being confronted with something very immediate but absolutely larger than I’ll ever be able to comprehend

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#30

Post by falcor84 »

dekhn wrote: post #24
gary17the wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human br…

One point about storage- it's economically driven. If there was a demand signal (say, the government dedicated a few hundred billion dollars to a single storage systems), hard drive manufacturers could deploy much more storage in a year. I've pointed this out to a number of scientists, but none of them could really think of a way to get the government to spend that much money just to store data without it curing a se…

> without it curing a senator's heart disease

Obviously I'm not advocating for this, but I'll just link to the Mad TV skit about how the drunk president cured cancer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va71a7pLvy8

Post reply on HN