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New Map IDs the Core of the Human Brain

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Jul 02, 2008 11:17 PM
from the I-want-to-see-what-you're-thinking dept.
Medicine Science
gerald626 writes "An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking — connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain. So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub. I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?"
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Submission: New map IDs the core of the human brain by gerald626 (197224)
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  • hub? (Score:5, Funny)

    by JazzyMusicMan (1012801) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:25PM (#24039739)
    I always thought the geek brain was based on token ring topology with the different nodes responsible for:
    • eat
    • sleep
    • video games
    • pr0n

    all running round robin =)

  • Google Brain (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dyne09 (1305257) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:25PM (#24039741)
    Come on, you know it's coming.

  • We knew that already. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Penguinisto (415985) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:29PM (#24039769) Journal

    Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

    ...pfft! The male gender of the species' "hub" is connected by a pair of some really long leads... they go down the spine, and connect directly to the testicles.

    The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.

    How much friggin' tax money did these guys spend discovering what we've already known for at least six millennia now?

    /P

    • Re:We knew that already. (Score:5, Funny)

      by William Robinson (875390) on Thursday July 03 2008, @12:33AM (#24040113)

      Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

      ...pfft! The male gender of the species' "hub" is connected by a pair of some really long leads... they go down the spine, and connect directly to the testicles.

      The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.

      /P

      Absolutely. And one needs to insert Gateway to establish a VPN.

      It's different story that females PKI mechanism is still unknown, and male species have to rely on brute force techniques to decipher some of the data, which unfortunately takes years after VPN is established.

  • Are schitzophrenics equipped with a neural equivalent of a dlink hub?

  • Now to find out what it does. (Score:3, Funny)

    by geckipede (1261408) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:32PM (#24039793)
    So we've found a candidate for the centre of consciousness in the brain. Who's up to volunteer to have it removed to see if they turn into a philosophical zombie?

    • Seriously, if we're going to kill them anyway, why not ask for volunteers to be experimented on? Anyone who survives, gets to have their sentence commuted?

      • Re:Find someone on death row? (Score:4, Funny)

        by servognome (738846) on Thursday July 03 2008, @12:29AM (#24040091)
        Hell, let's make it entertaining while we're at it, equip them with guns and send out guards in funny themed suits to hunt them down. Maybe use a CGI representation of that guy who hosted Family Fued to MC the whole event.

        • Oooooo, we can use the Chunk O' Brain we took out to finally get a computer to have that neat 'enhance' feature too. :-D

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hao Wu (652581)
      Imagine fitting your kids with filters and "plug-ins" to make sure they turn out a certain way... there will be modules for "Kindness".... or "Pride" (no matter whether it is earned- your child will always feel proud).

      "Christian" filters... "Jihad" algorithms.... Conservative and Liberal perception devices.... Behavioral controls, perhaps used as terms of parole (for violent criminals OR political prisoners).

      Why have disagreeable children when you can program perfectly behaved clones of yourself?

  • Not a switch. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bob&Max (95054) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:33PM (#24039801)

    You would not want a switch. Isolating all but broadcast packets to just their destination would stifle creativity. It has to be a hub and bandwidth in a highly-interconnected net may be unimportant.

    • Yeah, what you said, but I'd like to add something about bandwidth. It's a function of data per time period, and I'd think that having a higher interconnection speed could very well lead to a quickening of thought process, ONLY if the underlying signal PROCESSING nodes can keep up, and since AFAIK that's a more complicated chemical process it would seem to me that it would be difficult to adjust it. 'Uppers' can make your thought process faster, but I have no idea about what mechanisms determine the upper

    • Re:Not a switch. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mattwarden (699984) on Thursday July 03 2008, @12:59AM (#24040213) Homepage

      I'm trying to figure out what you mean by this, but I'm not sure I have it. If you meant the hub metaphor the whole way, then no that isn't how it works. If all messages went to all destinations, you can imagine how difficult it would be to make any sense of them. Further, when an area receives input, it is not a stateless message. It is received in a state of "sensitivity" (for lack of a more detailed explanation) and the fact that it is received in its state also alters the local state for future messages. The easiest example is sensory desensitization... like when you no longer smell that horrible smell once you've been in the sysadmin's office for a few minutes. The same destinations are getting the same inputs, but the local state has changed due to previous inputs and therefore there is a different result.

      So you can see that if all destinations got all inputs the brain would basically "white out" and be useless. The fact is that there is a very specific network structure. Each local network has projections into other local networks, which is why emotions and different sensory modalities have impacts on each other and on other "unrelated" areas of the brain.

  • GigE (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tubal-Cain (1289912)

    I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?

    Are you sure it would be an upgrade? The brain is a pretty incredible organ.

    • Considering I've heard gerald626 say he upgraded to Vista, I'd say it still counts as an upgrade for him.

  • Maybe Descartes wasn't so far off... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wherrera (235520) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:56PM (#24039909)
    Their newly mapped "medial and parietal cortex hub" is pretty close to the pineal gland [wikipedia.org], after all :).

  • Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MarshMan1101 (1137085) on Wednesday July 02 2008, @11:59PM (#24039919)
    Now we just need to figure out how to perform a denial of service attack.

  • Al Gore's next project: Interbrain (Score:3, Interesting)

    by clarkkent09 (1104833) on Thursday July 03 2008, @12:09AM (#24039969)
    So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub.

    Now it's just a matter of figuring out the protocol used and hooking up a few brains together. Seriously
  • "I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?" I look forward to re-reading this in three years.

  • ...Artificial Intelligence programming to come to these results?

  • Required Statement: (Score:5, Funny)

    by iamwhoiamtoday (1177507) on Thursday July 03 2008, @12:39AM (#24040147)
    Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these... Wait, isn't that basically a "Think Tank"?
  • Humans need to start defining the brain in terms of their rights -- specifically, that nobody has a right to read, write, or interfere with information within these nerve centers against our wishes.

    Not at ANY age, nor for ANY contract or job application.

  • A bit less, please (Score:3, Informative)

    by tgv (254536) on Thursday July 03 2008, @01:59AM (#24040417) Journal

    Diffusion imaging is not new and the problems are well-known. Basically, you try to estimate a flow by sampling a lot of points and connect them if they go in (more or less) the same direction. If a flow (in this case a fiber) changes direction too much between sample points, you make a mistake. Also, averaging over 5 people can lead to strange errors, but I guess the authors are competent enough to avoid those pitfalls.

    The thing about the hub isn't that interesting: don't think all traffic passes through it. And these fiber tracts are not supposed to do much processing anyway. It does strike me that the map is asymmetrical.

    One of the authors is quoted as saying: "This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do." That should probably be: from knowing the structure we can partially predict the BOLD response (what you measure in fMRI). So much for journalism.

  • Not the end of the story (Score:3, Informative)

    by HuguesT (84078) on Thursday July 03 2008, @02:25AM (#24040493)

    This is a very nice article, freely available to boot. However this is not the end of the story. Connectivity was discovered throught DT-MRI, essentially today yields an orientation tensor at each voxel. At present DT-MRI is really low resolution. There is quite a bunch of guesswork in the final result.

  • You already have a yotabyte switch (Score:3, Funny)

    by emilper (826945) on Thursday July 03 2008, @03:10AM (#24040613)

    You already have a yotabyte switch. All you need is an upgrade to the BS detector ROM.

  • Male VS female brain (Score:5, Interesting)

    by V!NCENT (1105021) on Thursday July 03 2008, @05:42AM (#24041159)
    I'd like to see the maps of both the male and the female brain. The female brain is smaller but has a larger hub between the RH and LH of the brain. That is why females can think of many things at ones. Another big difference between males and females is that males fixate all the power of their brains on a single thing, while females spread the power of their brain of many things. So the male and the female brain must differ a lot. It should be quite interesting to compare both brain maps.

  • I still keep it with... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hoodrat1140 (903869) on Thursday July 03 2008, @06:12AM (#24041295)
    ...Prof. C. McGinn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McGinn) Quote: ...He goes on to point out that "if one could know everything about your brain of a neural kind ...its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments ...the position of every atom and its subatomic structure ...everything that that materialist says your mind is, do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind, I know nothing about which conscious states you are in ... and what those states feel like to you ... knowledge of the brain does not give me knowledge of your mind. How then can the two be said to be identical?"...(The Mysterian Manifesto: Shakespeare, McGinn and Me, http://www.observer.com/node/43473 [observer.com])

  • connectomics? Ugh. No ad agency on the team (Score:3, Insightful)

    by smchris (464899) on Thursday July 03 2008, @06:38AM (#24041395)

    Can't decide whether this is great news or not.

    On the one hand, it should give AI research some inspiration on how to interface various AI functions.

    On the other hand, there's the slacker nature of evolution. Is the human brain really the _best_ we can do? The paradigm might set back AI theorizing for decades.
       

  • Connectome versus connectionism (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Xeth (614132) on Thursday July 03 2008, @08:39AM (#24042741) Journal

    I'm always surprised by the apparent discontinuity between the sort of AI research that goes on in computer science departments (where "connectionism" is a dirty word), and the fact that a lot of modern neuroscientists seem to think that we'll solve a lot of the brain by figuring out the connections.

    And, honestly, I don't think that DSI/DTI is really going to give us very much insight beyond bulk connectionism. When I spoke to Walter Schneider at a Neuromorphic computing workshop this past April, he told me that these sorts of processes operate at at a resolution around a tenth of a millimeter. While that's good for determining the highways of the brain, you can't very well figure out how a steel mill works by looking at a map its delivery trucks follow.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by shmlco (594907)

        From TFA: "The study examined the brains of FIVE human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques..."

    • A GigE switch would probably be a really good upgrade. The only problem is, you'd have to have a few billion ports on it.

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