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The interactive visualization is pretty great. Try zooming in on the slices and then scrolling up or down through the layers. Also try zooming in on the 3D mode
by teuobk 2y ago
The interactive visualization is pretty great. Try zooming in on the slices and then scrolling up or down through the layers. Also try zooming in on the 3D model. Notice how hovering over any part of a neuron highlights all parts of that neuron:
http://h01-dot-neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs://h01-release/assets/neuroglancer_states/20210601/c2_library.json http://h01-dot-neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs://h01-rele...
- jamiek88 2y agoMy god. That is stunning. To think that’s one single millimeter of our brain and look at all those connections. Now I understand why crows can be so smart walnut sized brain be damned. What an amazing thing brains are. Possibly the most complex things in the universe. Is it complex enough to understand itself though? Is that logically even possible?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 2y agoI wonder if we manage to annotate this much level of detail about our brain, and then let (some variant of the current) models train on it, will those intrinsically end up generalizing a model for intelligence?
- nicklecompte 2y agoI think you would also need the epigenetic side, which is very poorly understood: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/biologists-transfer-memory-between-snails https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/biologists-trans... We have more detail than this about the C. elegans nematode brain, yet we still no clue how nematode intelligence actually works.
- Animats 2y agoHow's OpenWorm coming along?
- nicklecompte 2y agoBadly: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elgans-after-10-years https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai... (the comments have some updates as of 2023) Almost every other cell in the worm can be simulated with known biophysics. But we don't have a clue how any individual nematode neuron actually works. I don't have the link but there are a few teams in China working on visualizing brain activity in living C. elegans, but it's difficult to get good measurements without affecting the behavior of the worm (e.g. reacting to the dye).
- RaftPeople 2y agoHere's a timely bit of new research: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk0002 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk0002 Summary (my paraphrasing): They partially figured out how two neurons (AVA, AVB) control forward and backward movement, previous theories assumed one neuron controlled forward and one controlled backward, but that didn't correctly model actual movement. They found that AVA+AVB combine in a complex mechanism with two different signaling/control methods acting at different timescales to produce a graded shifting between forward+backward when switching directions, as opposed to an on/off type switch (that previous models used but didn't match actual movements). Interesting learnings from this paper (at least for me): 1-Most neurons in worm are non-spiking (I had no idea, I've read about this stuff a lot and wasn't aware) 2-Non-spiking neurons can have multiple resting states at different voltages 3-Neurons AVA and AVB are different, they each have different resting state characteristics and respond differently to inputs
- nicklecompte 2y agoCrow/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/S0960982219308450 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.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoIIRC bird brains are 'packed/structured' very similar to our cerebellum. So one would just need to pick that little cube out of our cerebellum, to have that 'twice as complexity'.
- jamiek88 2y agoInteresting! Thank you. I didn’t know that.
- Terr_ 2y agoI expect we'll find that it's all a matter of tradeoffs in terms of count vs size/complexity... kind of like how the "spoken data rate" of various human languages seems to be the same even though some have complicated big words versus more smaller ones etc.
- sdenton4 2y agoBirds are under a different set of constraints than non-bat mammals, of course... They're very different. Songbirds have ~4x finer time Perception of audio than humans do, for example, which is exemplified by taking complex sparrow songs and showing them down until you can actually hear the fine structure. The human 'spoken data rate' is likely due to average processing rates in our common hardware. Birds have a different architecture.
- Terr_ 2y agoYou misunderstand, I'm not making any kind of direct connection between human speech and bird song. I'm saying we will probably discover that the "overall performance" of different vertebrate neural setups are clustered pretty closely, even when the neurons are arranged rather differently. Human speech is just an example of another kind of performance-clustering, which occurs for similar metaphysical reasons between competing, evolving, related alternatives.
- layer8 2y agoWe don’t know what “understanding” means (we don’t have a workable definition of it), so your question cannot be answered.
- m3kw9 2y agoPhysics of the universe is the most complex thing in the universe
- robgibbons 2y agoCan a hand grasp itself?
- danparsonson 2y agoNo, but neither can it compose a symphany.
- wg0 2y agoAnd yet recall all the hype and claims around LLMs reaching AGI within few years. LLMs that work at a very crude level of string tokens and emit probabilities.
- gofreddygo 2y agoThat is awesome ! the sheer number of things that work in co-ordination to make biology work! In-f*king-credible !
- oniony 2y agoHmm, that website does not honour my keyboard layout. Not sure how they managed that.