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Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

nature.com

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Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#121

Post by gary17the »

shpx wrote: post #115
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…

If you can preserve and scan the tissue in a way that lets you scan the same area multiple times you wouldn't need to digitize the whole thing. Put the slices on rotating platters with a microscope for each platter and read parts of the brain on demand. It's a hard drive but instead of magnets storing the bits of an image of the sample, it's the actual physical sample.

Not if you want to actually execute the state of a human brain in a digital simulation to see how it works and whether it still displays certain abilities such as comprehension and consciousness. Otherwise a digital scan of a brain is just a glorified microscope.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#122

Post by sph »

carabiner wrote: post #53
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?

It makes me think humans aren't special, and there is no soul, and consciousness is just a bunch of wires like computers. Seriously, to see the ENTIRETY of human experience, love and tragedy and achievement, are just electric potentials transmitted by those wiggly cells, just extinguishes any magic I once saw in humanity.

I dunno, the whole of human experience is what I expect of a system composed of 100,000,000,000,000 entities, with quintillions of interconnections, interacting together simultaneously on a molecular level. Happiness, sadness, love and hate can (obviously) be described and experienced with this level of complexity.

I'd be much more horrified to see our consciousness simplified to anything smaller than that, which is why any hype for AGI because we invented chatbots is absolutely laughable to me. We just invented the wheel and now hope to drive straight to the Moon.

Anyway, you are seeing a fake three dimensional simplification of a four+ dimensional quantum system. There is at least one unseen physical dimension in which to encode your "soul"

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#123

Post by dsalfdslfdsa »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #111
throw310822 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean energy-efficient, this would be neuron, or synapse-efficient.

Also, these two networks achieves vastly different results, per watt consumed. A NN creates a painting in 4s on my M2 MacBook; an artist in 4 hours. Are their used joules equivalent? How many humans would it take to simulate MacOS? Horsepower comparisons here are nuanced and fatally tricky!

What software are you using for local NN generation of paintings? Even so, the training cost of that NN is significant.

The general point is valid though - for example, a computer is much more efficient at finding primes, or encrypting data, than humans.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#124

Post by sigmoid10 »

djmips wrote: post #107
nicklecompte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's amusing to say that bird brains are on the next generation node size.

Would be interesting to see what their wafer yield is. Like, are they more or less prone to mental disease.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#126

Post by bamboozled »

carabiner wrote: post #53
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?

It makes me think humans aren't special, and there is no soul, and consciousness is just a bunch of wires like computers. Seriously, to see the ENTIRETY of human experience, love and tragedy and achievement, are just electric potentials transmitted by those wiggly cells, just extinguishes any magic I once saw in humanity.

Er, why can’t the wires be the experience ?

If the wires make consciousness then there is consciousness. The substrate is irrelevant and has no bearing on the awesomeness of the phenomena of knowing, experiencing and living.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#127

Post by ibeforee »

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…

We don’t know to even model that state: do we need the position and velocity and charge of every atom, or can a neuron be approximated by a bfloat?

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#128

Post by tlarkworthy »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #57
nicklecompte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might be a dumb question, because I doubt the distances between neurons makes a meaningful distance… But could a small brain, dense with neurons like a crow, possibly lead to a difference in things like response to stimuli or “compute” speed so to speak?

The electrical signals in brain are chemical reactions, not conductivity like a metal wire. They are slow! Synaptic junctions are a huge number of indirect chemical cascades, not a direct electrical connection, they are even slower! So brain morphology and connectome has a massive impact on what can be computed. Human twitch responses are done by cerebellum, not cerebrum. It's faster, but you can't do philosophy with the cerebellum, only learn to ride a bike etc. This is the brain doing the best it for the circumstances.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#129

Post by JKCalhoun »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #57
nicklecompte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might be a dumb question, because I doubt the distances between neurons makes a meaningful distance… But could a small brain, dense with neurons like a crow, possibly lead to a difference in things like response to stimuli or “compute” speed so to speak?

And here I was wondering if there were heat issues in a crow brain.
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