Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly 9.09495TB for anybody interested
Now you've done it, this thread is going to collapse into a binary-vs-metric data measurement flamewar.
Oh dear.. blame Google, not me!
Whole human brain mapped in 3D
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#12I'd love for a neuroscientist to weigh in on this - what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain?
Depends. First, a biological network is not just connections of neurons, it's weighted connections of neurons. And even saying that is a huge approximation. It's not just about mapping the topology of the brain, just having a neural network of 1e10 vertices and 1e12 links will not give you an artificial intelligence. It's just not that simple. The connectome paradigm is not sufficient. It is hip because of computer s…
I totally agree. The brain is drastically more complex than a CPU, which could be reverse engineered in such a fashion. That's because we have a solid understanding of what happens when electrons flow through a series of specialized circuits, and we can control (and model) the input and output of each one. We cannot yet control or predict that flow with a human neuron, I don't think. At least this map doesn't get us closer in that regard, as much as I want it to.
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#13Ten TRILLION bytes... It's okay, Nature, the word terabyte doesn't scare people and is indeed now part of common parlance...
Yeah but Ten Trillion Bytes sounds a lot bigger than 9 TB.
I think that's the intention. Regardless of how you look at it however: It's still really impressive
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly 9.09495TB for anybody interested
Now you've done it, this thread is going to collapse into a binary-vs-metric data measurement flamewar.
Metric won that war ;-)
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#15Ten TRILLION bytes... It's okay, Nature, the word terabyte doesn't scare people and is indeed now part of common parlance...
Apologies (one of Nature's editors here). Believe it or not it was in terabytes when we sent the copy to our sub-editors (ie copy editors) and they changed it because they thought our readers wouldn't get it. We're as bemused as you.
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#16The BigBrain dataset is a subject of the NSA's research into graph analysis [1]. Some sample numbers:
- 100 billion vertices, 100 trillion edges
- 2.08 mNA · bytes^2 (molar bytes) adjacency matrix
- 2.84 PB adjacency list
- 2.84 PB edge list
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#17Here is part of the software that was used to create this:
as confirmed here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/06/19/340.6139....
Hell yeah, free science requires free software!
Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#18Re: Whole human brain mapped in 3D
#19I'd love for a neuroscientist to weigh in on this - what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain?
>what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain? If possible, this would open a huge ethical can of worms: how can we tell such a simulation is not conscious? Would deleting its runtime data after however many simulation cycles be tantamount to murder? Edit: I am not saying that the above concerns s…
Heh... as serious as they may be, the idea of one of those hypothetical ethical issues science fiction authors have written a million almost-but-not-quite-plausible takes on finally becoming real makes me giddy. I suppose it has already happened for certain issues, but nothing so dramatic as considering a simulation conscious!
Then again, it will likely be many years still before that actually comes up.