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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

#51

Post by keybored »

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…

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

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#52

Post by idrios »

dang wrote: post #39
droideqa wrote: post #14

There is this interesting past post: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36568609

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)

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#53

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mont_tag wrote: post #12
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #9

Earlier 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?

https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#54

Post by roywiggins »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #38
BurningFrog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article describes it as slicing the fly brain into very thin slices, which are imaged by an electron microscope. Then you analyze the slice images and determine the neurons and their connection. This is the hard part, and the breakthrough is an AI based method. Pretty sure they've only mapped one brain so far.

Fortunately, the whole chain of slicing, imaging, and analysis are now at least partially automated, so in theory you can repeat the process with nothing more than some time on the equipment and a bit of compute. In practice, I suspect there's a fair bit of grad student manual labor that keeps the pipeline flowing...

They crowdsourced three million manual corrections to the AI output, yeah.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#56

Post by roywiggins »

meindnoch wrote: post #31
swayvil wrote: post #24

Simulated too? I assume that if you can map it then you can simulate it. Am I correct?

Simulating it would require many orders of magnitude more compute. Biological neurons are not just a sigmoid function.

> In one paper, for example, researchers used the connectome to create a computer model of the entire fruit-fly brain, including all the connections between neurons. They tested it by activating neurons that they knew either sense sweet or bitter tastes. These neurons then launched a cascade of signals through the virtual fly’s brain, ultimately triggering motor neurons tied to the fly’s proboscis — the equivalent of the mammalian tongue. When the sweet circuit was activated, a signal for extending the proboscis was transmitted, as if the insect was preparing to feed; when the bitter circuit was activated, this signal was inhibited. To validate these findings, the team activated the same neurons in a real fruit fly. The researchers learnt that the simulation was more than 90% accurate at predicting which neurons would respond and therefore how the fly would behave.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#57

Post by dekhn »

willcipriano wrote: post #37

50 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.

No, beetles (JBS Haldane said god has an "inordinate fondness for beetles")

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#59

Post by AStonesThrow »

willcipriano wrote: post #37

50 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.

Yeah but you can earn CPU cycles and egress bandwidth by sending bug reports

Keeps your virtual landlord happy... Landlord of the Flies, if you will.

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