MIT Crowdsources and Gamifies Brain Analysis

MrSeb writes "There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. Starting small and working its way up, MIT today launched Eyewire, a crowdsourced 'game' that tasks users with wiring up the neurons in a mouse's retina. A future stage of the game will get users to find the synapses, too."

Re:Nice!

[oodaloop]

Except that no one's brain has ever been "filled" up. And in any case, no one individual needs to fully understand it, just as no one individual knows every step in making a car from raw material to finished product. It's divided into multiple niches so that some individuals understand how to mine iron ore, make windshields, design new parts, assemble engines, etc. We as a species understand plenty of things no one individual understands.

Re:Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

You and one of your follow-up posters suggested that the eye was basically too simple to try this technique on. This is not correct. The eye contains the retina, which is actually a part of the brain. It's a sort of small computer in the eye that, for example, calculates motion direction. Understanding how this works is cutting edge research, to which this technique has already contributed: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7337/full/nature09818.html

On a more general note, acquiring these datasets takes a long time. Tracing the connections takes even longer. And there's a limit on how big they can get, which is a fraction of a millimeter along each edge. These things taken together put pretty strong constraints on what parts of the brain you should look at. Most of them will contain circuits that are too big to image or too big to reconstruct or both. This is why these guys have chosen to start with something simple, where they knew in advance that interesting circuits would be contained in the very small volume.

Disclaimer: I work in the field.