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An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
61–70 of 208 posts
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#62What hard steps exist between mapping the physical structure of the brain and simulating a running one via software?
Knowing what the individual neurons actually do. The connectome is like an electrical schematic but you don't even know which components are resistors, inductors, etc (let alone the resistances and inductances).
The connectome for the C. elegans nematode was mapped in the 1980s and the OpenWorm project has successfully simulated all non-neuronal cells. But they are very far from simulating the brain abd it will take decades of experimental work to understand C. elegans's brain - it's very difficult to observe a living brain in the required molecular detail.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#63What hard steps exist between mapping the physical structure of the brain and simulating a running one via software?
Knowing what the individual neurons actually do. The connectome is like an electrical schematic but you don't even know which components are resistors, inductors, etc (let alone the resistances and inductances). The connectome for the C. elegans nematode was mapped in the 1980s and the OpenWorm project has successfully simulated all non-neuronal cells. But they are very far from simulating the brain abd it will take…
I think it's even more complex. The neurons are like individual raspberry pi. They have both complex logic and physical memory.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#64Better source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#6550 years from now I am dying in a hospital bed, the nurse informs me that my consciousness will be uploaded to a computer with all the other brains, a digital heaven if you will. Get there and its full of flies.
heaven? not so fast. how about solving captchas at 100x speed for 100 years to aid the development of some ai vision project?
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36568609 - July 2023 (94 comments) The connectome of an insect brain by Winding et al. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35112234 - March 2023 (1 comment) Map of an Insect’s Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111371 - March 2023 (119 comments) The Connectome of an Insect Brain - https://news.ycombina…
Another for you: Map of an Insect’s Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111371 - March 2023 (119 comments)
Inserted. Thank you!
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#67It was my understanding that all this connectome-based research was largely a deadend, because it doesnt capture dynamics, nor a vast array of interactions. if you've ever seen neurones being grown (go search YT), you'll see it's a massive gelatinous structure which is highly plastic and highly dynamic. Even in the simplest brains (eg., of elgans), you get 10^x exponential growth in number of neurones and their conne…
You just need to supply your own training data.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's my (layman) understanding that it's more or less a wiring diagram. Synapse #8217492 connects neuron #27472 and neuron #27865. It's a graph with 140,000 nodes (neurons) and 54.5 million edges (synapses). And then some labels for them like neurotransmitter type, which class of brain operations they're associated with, its size and position in 3D, etc. They have a cool website that lets you browse the data: https:/…
Is the data such that it can be modeled in software?
Depends what you mean by "modeled". You can probably create a visualization of it, but the data doesn't include any information about the dynamics of the system, how the neurons behave. So, you can't "simulate a brain" to any extent with this data, if that's what you were thinking.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#69"human brains could follow" feels like a few jumps ahead? a fruit fly has on the order of 100k neurons, a human brain has on the order of 100 billion neurons. that's 6 orders of magnitude larger. that's like saying "A map of San Francisco has been completed, the entire solar system could follow!"
The method used seems like it would work as well on bigger brains. The amount of data may mean we have to wait for Moore's Law to keep improving things for a while though.
The method used required 3 million manual human corrections. Even if Moore's Law actually still meant anything for compute power, this is still many orders of magnitude from scaling to a human brain.
Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped
#70Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type. A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That…
Cartographers have mapped Scotland. [random scribe muses that] The whole world could be next.
Did a rough calculation, it would be more like Edinburgh.
There's easily a century between the earliest accurate map of Edinburgh and the earliest accurate map of the world. And even at present, the accuracy of maps of Edinburgh is much greater than the accuracy of maps of the world.
So yeah, the whole world could be next. But the person you're replying to has a point when they say significant improvements are needed.