New Map IDs the Core of the Human Brain 186
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?"
hub? (Score:5, Funny)
all running round robin =)
Re:hub? (Score:4, Funny)
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So instead of one ring to rule them all, would it be one token?
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D:
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I was thinking more like the Monty Python spam sketch, except with pr0n instead of spam. Particularly the vikings in the back chanting pr0n pr0n pr0n while everything else goes on seems appropriate.
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Hmmm. That means a migraine might just be a beaconing condition.
Google Brain (Score:4, Funny)
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GoogleBrainMaps (Score:2)
GoogleBrainMaps, actually.
No "mashups," please!
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You forgot to add 'Beta' to that name. ;)
We knew that already. (Score:5, Funny)
Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
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?
Re:We knew that already. (Score:5, Funny)
Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
The female of the species' "hub" goes straight to the left ring finger.
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.
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The female ring finger locus is actually a quite recent evolutionary phenomenon. The "tradition" of a diamond wedding ring was started by DeBeers in the 1930's.
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On the contrary, wedding and engagement rings go back for over 500 years, although back then, even the wedding ring was just for the woman. The idea of the diamond as the "standard" jewel for an engagement ring was created by the DeBeers campaign, though.
So if our brains are like a hub... (Score:5, Funny)
Are schitzophrenics equipped with a neural equivalent of a dlink hub?
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Close. It's a Belkin. Dlink causes manic depression.
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I'm schizophrenic, you insensitive clod!
Thats nothing. Both of us are schizophrenic!
(yes I know, I'm going to burn for that, thats not really what schizophrenia is, yada yada.)
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No you're not, there's no fire or hell, it's all in your head, but you're unable to tell.
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...joke's too subtle for you!
Now to find out what it does. (Score:3, Funny)
Find someone on death row? (Score:2)
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)
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Oooooo, we can use the Chunk O' Brain we took out to finally get a computer to have that neat 'enhance' feature too. :-D
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It's unconstitutional? 8th amendment, cruel and unusual punishment, all that.
It's also ethically questionable. Prisoners are an institutionalized population, and are therefore a vulnerable population (children, mentally ill fall here too) so a researchers gotta jump through a couple of hoops to get clearance to use them. It'd probably be really hard, if not impossible because of the reward, to get this past an IRB.
All that aside, from a scientific standpoint the findings are of limited value because it's a
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It's unconstitutional? 8th amendment, cruel and unusual punishment, all that.
If the constitution says its unethical to do something that MIGHT kill them but its 100% okay to do something that will kill them then the Constitution isn't worth the paper its written on.
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But its torture he's volunteering for. If he's willing to task that risk, then who are we to deny him the possibility of life, simply because it could be painful?
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"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?
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Who said a clone would be agreeable? :) But I say we let people make clones and made-to-order children if they want. To me, that's our next big step in our evolution. Although, it would be much nicer if we developed the ability to change ourselves and evolve without needing a thousand generations of crappy offspring first :) It'd be like changing your resolution. If it turns out badly, just revert back and try something else.
Re:Now to find out what it does. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Imagine fitting your kids with filters and "plug-ins" to make sure they turn out a certain way.
We already do. It's called "parenting". You do it by talking to them, and yes, it does work if you do it properly.
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and, of course, a kill switch [slashdot.org]
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As I understand the concept, you wouldn't be able to tell. The philosophical zombie is a creature which acts just as if it were conscious - it even holds sensible conversations - but which is in fact not conscious.
So, you walk up to a zombie and ask 'Are you a zombie?' It answers, 'No, of course not: I'm a conscious human being.' And however cleverly you interrogate it, you cannot distinguish it from a human being.
Not a switch. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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In my experience, amphetamines don't so much speed up the thought process, but change the ability to control focus (some people it improves focus, others it does the oposite). In computer terms, it may seem like I'm running a faster processor, but actually I'm disconnecting other running threads, freeing the memory bandwidth they'd be using to be usable by my primary thread (the task at hand).
Re:Not a switch. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Thankfully, the brain is analog
No it's not... there's just so many bits that it appears so. But each receptor site of each neuron is either triggered (gate opened allowing ions to flow in, changing neuron potential) or not (gate closed). The neuron's either reached the potential it needs or it hasn't; it either fires or it doesn't. It's all still ones and zeroes.
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That isn't true. The brain is not digital by any means. Signaling does occur even when the threshold potential is not reached and an action potential is not fired. Further, the state of the surrounding chemical environment and the internal state of the neuron itself make sure that not all action potentials are created equal.
What they tell you in Intro to Biopsychology is simplified to the point of not really being true (just like math classes).
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Technically, what you describe isn't analog (i.e. continuous and infinitely differentiable); it's digital, except probabilistic rather than the more familiar deterministic.
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No, it isn't. I guess I am not doing a great job of explaining, so let me repeat more simply: there is strong evidence that there is infinitely graduated inter-neuronal signaling apart from action potentials. This is 5+ year old information, too.
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FYI alcohol doesn't really kill brain cells (unless you were to pour the alcohol directly on the brain cells, perhaps).
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FYI alcohol doesn't really kill brain cells (unless you were to pour the alcohol directly on the brain cells, perhaps).
Yeah. That sounds like a Darwin Award waiting to happen.
GigE (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Considering I've heard gerald626 say he upgraded to Vista, I'd say it still counts as an upgrade for him.
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Agreed. The densely woven physical layer carries timing information in the analog domains, with extensive cross-connections, that are very difficult to simulate in a classical Turing machine or binary network. The switches between complex analog mixing and routing, and the centralization or near digitization of the signals to provide reliable low bandwidth communications to more central or more remote processing, is material all network engineers could learn quite a lot from.
Maybe Descartes wasn't so far off... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks, asshole. That link crashed Firefox.
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Why the hell is my post modded funny? I'm entirely serious.
This is the kind of nightmares... (Score:2)
...that may cause legislators to bring back death penalty. ...at least those who survived the eyes-bleeding.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
'Support the troops...'
'Think of the children...'
'Pater noster...'
'Microsoft Sucks...'
Al Gore's next project: Interbrain (Score:3, Interesting)
Now it's just a matter of figuring out the protocol used and hooking up a few brains together. Seriously
Re: "GigE" (Score:2, Funny)
But did they use any...... (Score:2)
...Artificial Intelligence programming to come to these results?
Required Statement: (Score:5, Funny)
Protect individuals (Score:2, Interesting)
Not at ANY age, nor for ANY contract or job application.
A bit less, please (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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.
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fMRI has always had issues with the fact that it doesn't measure time-varying signals very well in the brain. Which means that it basically can't track fast brain activity, since it needs 2 to 5 seconds to resolve.
Doppler Sonography by contrast provides a way of measuring neural activity with a high degree of resolution in the time domain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17290143 [nih.gov]
Learned this in the very excellent Brain Hacks book by O'Reilly, which isn't about hacking the brain, really, at all, but just a
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Doppler ultrasound has the same problem as fMRI: it depends on blood flow changes. Naturally blood flow response has a delay associated with it, relative to the actual neural activity. Basically, you're sampling the same slow responding phenomenon with a faster sampling rate. Plus you can only get data from a small area around the temples and not at all in many people who's skulls are too thick.
Many labs are combining fMRI and EEG. EEG gives you good temporal resolution by actually sampling the electric
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Very nice.
But yeah, it's an awesome book.
tubes (Score:2, Funny)
geeks using a networking analogy to describe the brain.
sounds as lame as senators using a tubes analogy to describe the internet.
nooge.
You already have a yotabyte switch (Score:3, Funny)
You already have a yotabyte switch. All you need is an upgrade to the BS detector ROM.
Pretty accurate (Score:2, Funny)
Male VS female brain (Score:5, Interesting)
it supports a nice theory (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a theory of conciousness that can get some support from this hub thingy.
Basically, why are we conscious? Apart from the world becoming much more boring it should be some kind of biological advantage to evolve that way.
The theory states that consciousness is similar to a theater. With only one stage and one focus of light.
Attendants to the play are all the brain subsystems.
Actors are all the subconscious process wanting to become conscious (the current inputs of senses , memory, etc.). They compete
I still keep it with... (Score:3, Interesting)
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If I gave you 100-trillion lines of spaghetti code, would you say you know everything about how the program works?
connectomics? Ugh. No ad agency on the team (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Isn't this topology patented? (Score:2, Funny)
Isn't this topology patented? Are we all going to have to pay royalties to Al Gore to use our brains?
Key (Score:2, Interesting)
> Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may
> be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
Important, yes. Key to the Big Picture, i.e. consciousness? Doubtful. Your brain is really two brains, each lobe capable of thought and consciousness without the other. People can and do have hemispherectomies, believe it or not, and still remain conscious.
I wonder if anyone like this ever understood AI and could describe the experience, though.
Connectome versus connectionism (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
GigE upgrade? (Score:2, Funny)
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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.
Highway map not Core map (Score:2, Insightful)
Who's brain did they map, Dr. Daystrom? (Score:2, Funny)
You-need-not-fear. (Score:2, Funny)
So basically our brain is a network connected to a hub. I wonder if I can get an upgrade to a GigE switch?
Cybermen will remove fear. Cybermen will remove sex, and class, and color, and creed. You will become identical. You will become like us.
Begin upgrading.
Nice. And now... (Score:2)
I say that VERY tongue-in-cheek, being a high-tech manager
Re:If I was from Control (Score:5, Funny)
I thought Control was located somewhat further south.
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the stomach?
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Beavis: (clutching heart) My liver! My liver!
Butt-Head: Uhhh.... lower down, dude.
Beavis: (clutching nads) My liver! My liver!
So Clearly you're from Kaos? (Score:2)
Damn germans!
Re:If I was from Control (Score:5, Informative)
Overnight being the last 14 years.
It comes from
Deep Space Homer [wikipedia.org], an episode of the simpsons that first aired on February 24, 1994.
Spoiler:
When in space Homer flies into the Ant colony, breaking it open sending Ants everywhere. The ants make it onto the camera. Since the ants are so close to the camera, they appear very large. Kent Brockman (the Simpsons news anchor) then says "And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords".
The more you know(tm)
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Hail Ants!
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You need to read more:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=459006&cid=22476564 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235007&cid=19155051 [slashdot.org]
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235329&cid=19192413 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=375275&cid=21531939 [slashdot.org]
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=274687&cid=20298559 [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133979&cid=11182047 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223584&cid=18105912 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.or [slashdot.org]
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The influx of "If I was from Control" posts is CDMA_Demo's effort to single-handedly kickstart a new meme:
http://slashdot.org/~CDMA_Demo [slashdot.org]
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I haven't seen it in the past year+ I've been here...
I assure you it's been used quite a bit. The following query turns up 855 hits on google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.org+welcome+our+new+overlords [google.com]
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Which one's the queen?
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Re:If I was from Control (Score:4, Funny)
Pull the stick out of your ass and learn to take a fucking joke.
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Of course you'd say that, you have the brainpan of stagecoach tilter.
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From TFA: "The study examined the brains of FIVE human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques..."
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120 millibits per second? That's... 8.3 seconds to transmit a single on/off state. You're probably not getting the best possible experience there.
Re:Who needs an IQ score... (Score:4, Funny)
GP started typing that post a few weeks ago.