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An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

economist.com

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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#141

Post by consf »

rkp8000 wrote: post #29
mjburgess wrote: post #3

It 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…

Connectome-adjacent neuroscientist here. Definitely not a dead end! But also definitely not the whole picture. One of the main open questions in neuroscience right now is how network structure, dynamics, and function are related in the brain. Connectomes provide tremendous insight into structure, but as mentioned this does not generically solve either the dynamics or function problem. For example, for many of these n…

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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#142

Post by consf »

xandrius wrote: post #88
Animats wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's Open Worm coming along? The connectome of C. Elegans has been known for years, and Open Worm tries to simulate it. [1] Not with enormous success. [1] https://openworm.org/assets/OpenWormPoster_Celegans_Glasgow_...

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#143

Post by consf »

cafebeen wrote: post #102
xandrius wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

Budgets are finite, and most science funding involves some decision making about how to allocate resources.

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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#144

Post by v-erne »

falcor84 wrote: post #98
criddell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is like getting a static map of the country's roads with no cars on it. I was thinking it was more like giving somebody iPhone schematics and die shots of all the chips and then asking them to figure out how Portrait Mode works in the Camera app.

The difference is that in the brain there's no real separation between hardware and software, so I'm your analogy, we also have the equivalent of the source code, but just maybe not the environment configuration needed to get it to run (nor would we at this stage have sufficient compute to fully run it).

Any man made hardware is rather too organized to be good analogy here. But we have better alternatives than came along recently - LLMs or any kind of AI models as a matter of fact. Personally I would use analogy of "try running a prompt locally and then explain what really happened inside in terms of CPU operations" :)

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#145

Post by houseplant »

osrec wrote: post #104
PaulKeeble wrote: post #32

Going 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…

You seem to have called it a fruit flu twice... Was that a typo or do you actually mean to call it a flu instead of a fly?!

maybe he just has big fingers.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#146

Post by mr_toad »

cafebeen wrote: post #102
xandrius wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

Budgets are finite, and most science funding involves some decision making about how to allocate resources.

It’s a non-profit volunteer run project. People spend more money on stamp collections.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#147

Post by jcfrei »

1-6 wrote: post #139
keybored wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cartographers have mapped Scotland. [random scribe muses that] The whole world could be next.

This reminds me of the coastline paradox. I wonder if it applies to mapping an organism’s brain. For example, one can say they know the length of Scotland’s coastline but as the resolution increases, so does the coastline’s length. It’s infinite.

The resolution increases but the information doesn't. Apply some compression algorithm on the higher resolution coastline and you will find that you can reduce size massively. Same with LLMs and same with mapping the brain probably.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#148

Post by criddell »

samatman wrote: post #81
criddell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is like getting a static map of the country's roads with no cars on it. I was thinking it was more like giving somebody iPhone schematics and die shots of all the chips and then asking them to figure out how Portrait Mode works in the Camera app.

Sort of, but mostly not. The critical distinction is that, given better data (the instruction set, the source code or binary of the OS and camera app), the schematics and die shots aren't necessary or even useful. It's unlikely that brains have an abstraction layer like that, so work like this is a necessary precondition to understanding the rest of how it works. That actual understanding may be elusive for quite som…

> given better data

And maybe there’s some data or concept that will one day be discovered that will be the key to unlocking how brains work.

For my analogy, I was thinking more of how the connectome is, like schematics, static and the dynamic part is probably more interesting.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#149

Post by hwillis »

dkarbayev wrote: post #140
ben_w wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human Genome Project and everything derived from it. IIRC, that was originally proposed as a cancer research project: "A Turning Point in Cancer Research: Sequencing the Human Genome" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3945817 Even without that I'm not sure why you think that's a good point — it's very easy to find serendipitous examples in medicine in general, e.g. viragra which was initially a heart trea…

Was there any "productionization" of the "cure" for baldness & gray hair, after it was discovered 7 years ago? I reckon, there's a huge market for that cure.

https://perfecthairhealth.com/why-krox20-isnt-a-miracle-hair...

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#150

Post by codeulike »

Jun8 wrote: post #80

My (maybe very ignorant) question is: can this connectome be used to “run” simulations of a virtual fruit fly, a la MMAcevedo?

MMAcevedo is a reference to this short story (in the form of a future wiki article) which is brilliant, if you havent read it do check it out

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.

...

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads. However, MMAcevedo's innate skills and personality make it fundamentally unsuitable for many workloads.

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