Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

Post by simonster » Mon, Feb 18, 2013, 11:36 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #61

simonster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought a lot about why fMRI data analysis tools are so terrible, and I've come up with a few reasons: - It's impossible to implement the algorithms for fMRI data analysis efficiently in most "dynamic" programming languages due to the performance hit you take from using a dynamic language. (It might actually be possible in Julia, NumPyPy, Python with Numba, but these languages are not yet well-established.) On t…

Let's add to that fMRI data is next to useless for actually studying the brain. It can map large scale organisation, but it's like trying to measure the economy based on which power stations are in use at any given time.

Post by neuroguy » Tue, Feb 19, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

return0 wrote: post #54

keypusher wrote: post #15

While there has been a huge growth in brain research over the last decade or so, the methods and analysis are still immature, and results are often quite fuzzy (even if researchers would like their reviewers to believe otherwise). There also doesn't seem to be a clear goal here, other than to throw a bunch of money at some interesting questions. The Genome Project had the very clear goal of mapping the human genome.…

Add to those NEURON ( http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/ ) which is the most popular for compartmental neuron simulations. It's a terribly old program (1990) with horrible limitations yet people still use it.

Post by xijuan » Tue, Feb 19, 2013, 12:37 AM UTC

Post by lars » Tue, Feb 19, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

mortehu wrote: post #69

lars wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte. That's a better perspective to take when dealing with exponential growth. Of course, the genome and the brain are different things, but the point remains that if you believe this will have an exponential growth, being far away from solving it is exactly where you expect us to be right now. And even now, we do have quite good computational models…

> you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte. It seems to be only 19.93 times according to Wolfram Alpha? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log%281+terabyte%2F1+me...

Post by james-p » Wed, Feb 20, 2013, 5:20 AM UTC

lars wrote: post #25

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #12

Sounds like snake oil. Too early to build a complete human brain model. Simpler brain models (cat, lizard) haven't been done yet (?) but that's not headline-worthy. How about "President announces program to solve all human suffering"? About as meaningless, but would actually be more useful if by some astronomical fluke they succeeded.

It's on the same timescale as the European Blue Brain Project (and also Kurzweil's predictions, if you put any faith in that). If you believe that this an information technology that has an exponential growth, it's not a sufficient objection that we're far off now. The same objections were raised for the Human Genome Project, which was far from completion most of its duration, but followed an exponential growth and c…