Whole Human Brain Mapped In 3D 99
ananyo writes "An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety. The atlas, called 'BigBrain,' shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies (abstract). The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 10 terabytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue."
So how is she? (Score:5, Funny)
After that procedure of mapping her brain, did she recover well? were there any side effects? When will we have the first interviews?
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HINT: only a brainless person would find this funny.
You mean a man?
Re:So how is she? (Score:5, Funny)
She seems ok, but she can't stop watching FOX for some reason
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Well, we replaced it with an electronic brain, a simple one. All it needed to say was "What?" and "Where's the tea?"
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I was thinking the exact same thing:
"No, no," said Frankie, "it's the brain we want to buy."
"What!"
"Well, who would miss it?" inquired Benjy.
"I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically," protested Ford.
"Oh yes," said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's got to be prepared."
"Treated," said Benjy.
"Diced."
"Thank you," shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair and backing away from the table in horror.
"It could always be replaced," said Benjy reasonably, "if you think it's important
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Too soon to say. She's really pissed about the whole deal.
She'll recover once we get exaflop computing. (Score:2)
next we need to use Google Maps... (Score:2)
Re: Next we need to use Google Maps... (Score:1)
In science, Google maps out your brain!
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to figure out a route between what I want to say and my speech centers
Interestingly, some studies have found that at least some of the time, you actually say things before you create the "memory" that you want to -- your brain then constructs the memory that you intended to say that after the fact. Spooky stuff.
However, something else that I'm curious about is this: it's known that male and female brains, while sharing the same generic topography, are actually significantly different, both in use of grey and white matter,, and in density of neurons in various areas and devel
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no what need is to use it to figure out the route between what i say and my wife's interpretation centers, and back again, so i can figure out how mad she'll be and why about whatever normal innocent thing i say before i say it, and i can properly interpret it when she says "Fine" or "Really?".
How Complex Can It Be? (Score:3)
10 terabytes? The entropy for the entire human body is about 700 megabytes as per DNA, surely there must be a lower order of complexity than that in the brain?
Re: How Complex Can It Be? (Score:5, Insightful)
The dna is just the code. The brain represents the running state of that code following 65 years worth of exogenous and endogenous inputs.
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No? DNA is instructions; if you run a 700 mb program for 65 years, subject to an entire world of input, it will probably generate a lot more than 10 tb of data. The data, in the case of the brain, is the way the neurons connect to each other. Were that complexity limited by DNA we wouldn't be able to remember anything that wasn't already hardcoded into our DNA; we would be non-learning beasts of pure instinct.
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Not at all. Brains are useful.
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Fractals are very complex structures produced by very simple equations. The data needed to store a fractal image is much greater than the data needed to store the equation that can generate it.
Same deal here between DNA and the structures that get built from it.
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That's a decent analogy, but it leaves out that a bunch of the structure of the brain is driven by environmental stimuli.
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Why is a SVG-based image a much smaller filesize than a identical raster-based image? Because the SVG-based image tells HOW to build the image while the raster-based image just described each and every pixel.
Same thing applies to this case. The human genome may be 700 MB as you state, but that only describes HOW to build a human so to speak, not what it looks like after it's finished. Human DNA doesn't say that a particular spot of an organ should be this color, and a adjacent spot a slightly different co
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You do realize that people interact with their environment, right?
Sure, once they leave their mom's basement. So how often is that?
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The blueprints for a house are a few MBs. A 3D Scan of the house down to the texture of the wood would be petabytes.
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For raw data, of course, but since the house is mostly planar surfaces you most likely could massively reduce the data using octrees, kd-trees, or other methods.
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If you want to understand how houses in general work though, it's better to study those blueprints than the color of the counter-tops in the kitchen.
Good (Score:1)
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In response to your reply, you have NO idea what wetware bugs I am referring to. Maybe I am talking about alzheimer's, schizophrenia, or dementia? What does that have to do with facing life's challenges? Even if it is a case of being a "cry baby", are you a psychiatrist or a neurologist that can make a diagnosis based on a few message boa
Boot that brain! (Score:1)
Ethics (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider for a moment that were possible. Probably not today, at some point if driver software could be written to run this digital model. If by some long shot it were possible would it be ethically right? What if there were some sense of awareness, personality, fear of the strange circumstances she now finds herself in? She would be without her senses and without any level of input from the outside that she would relate to as a normal person.
And then consider: Is it right to turn such a system on and off like any other computer?
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A soul? Probably not. But then I've never seen any evidence for souls, so my best bet is that I'm as soulless as an average brick. It wouldn't be fair of me to look down on her for lacking something I don't possess myself.
Now, the question of if she's real is an interesting one, which has been discussed to death by various philosophers. The discussion usually goes something like:
Imagine that the test subject has a wholly human brain. There's no question whether the subject is real or not. Now, replace a sin
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I was thinking more along the lines of Chinese room [wikipedia.org] or Chine brain [wikipedia.org].
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What do you mean by the term "Soul"? It seems so broad that it loses meaning quickly.
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"Something intangible."
See that makes it very difficult to discuss. Maybe there's another way to get at what your suggesting other than the term "soul".
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Re:Ethics (Score:4, Interesting)
On her, no way it's possible. The brain went too long between death and digitisation - no oxygen means rapid and extreme damage. Even if the scan were good enough to get synapse-level tracing (It isn't), it wouldn't run.
Give it a few more decades though, maybe as much as a century. There's nothing scientifically impossible about it - it's just an engineering challenge. I imagine you'd need to resort to either nondestructive living readout (Future super-MRI?) or some sort of preservation process (Cryonic or chemical).
Senses can be simulated too. Just wire up to a robot, or a simulated environment.
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Yes. It'd probably need a combination approach: A long, long session or series of sessions in the scanner to collect a lot of functional information, followed by removing the brain for a slice-and-scan to get some of the finer details. The patient may not survive, but if the patient has a terminal disease already... why not?
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Consider for a moment that were possible. Probably not today, at some point if driver software could be written to run this digital model. If by some long shot it were possible would it be ethically right?
You clearly don't read enough science fiction. Of course it would be ethical. Then we could all retire to a computerized wonderland of drugs and sex with no side effects. Trillions of lives could be encoded with out the crazy need for real food, clothing and shelter. If it could be done it would be Nirvana/Heaven/Wonderland/Paradise come true!!! Rock on supercomputers. I wanna be your first upload.
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I wanna be your first upload.
Oh really? You want to be a beta tester for that? Me, I'm waiting for rev 3, at least.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
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A definite point, even though I don't agree with the grandparent. He's right that energy *IS* a constraining factor. Even worse (currently) is our inability to maintain a nearly closed ecosystem. I suspect that accelerations in space will always be slow, and I suspect that FTL is actually impossible. That still doesn't close off even meat-organisms to space (except that we haven't learned to maintain a nearly closed ecosystem).
Since once you're in orbit, low accelerations suffice to reach any other loca
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OK. I made one "typo" (well, "though-o"). I mean fission power, rather than fusion, would be enough to get us out to the Oort clouds.
OTOH, the icy moons of Jupiter have too high a gravity to be an attractive choice. You'd need specially designed equipment. Those are no minor masses. Still, there are plenty of icy asteroids beyond Jupiter's orbit.
WRT the Oort clouds...there's a lot of stuff there, but it's rather thinly spread. So figure long transition times between "stops". Probably not practical unt
Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)
Thus begins the next Cylon revolution. Not from a transplanted girl dealing with the emotional stress of knowing that her fleshy self has died, but starting from an elderly lady who now has the army of combat drones to successfully force everyone 'off her lawn.'
Now we only have to figure out what it does (Score:2)
Re:Now we only have to figure out what it does (Score:5, Funny)
We will not only understand how the human brain works, we will finally understand A WOMAN!
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Next step, figuring out how to speed up the process.
Redefining the structure of the brain (Score:3, Insightful)
I always worry when such notions arise. After all, everyone has a slightly different brain. some people have entire regions and functions mapped to areas we thought were science fiction just a decade or two ago. (typically the result of serious childhood brain trauma)
For all we know her brain might differ from the norm, or her regional background might produce a similar anomaly. We'll need many thousands more of such scans.
While this is and should be a celebrated achievement we must keep in mind that microscopically accurate scans will most likely be required on a per individual basis.
Perhaps in the future we'll all carry our own 10PB brain map in our sub-dermal biochips.
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but if we can learnt o understand hers, we can learn to understand others. eventually a methodology to map and understand the brain in a living person, without surgery, could be the norm. alzheimers beings to set in? No problem. Step into the BRI machine for a few a hours, doc reads the results, then they apply a small implant to the precise relevant location of your unique brain to repair the malfunctioning communication relay.
Awesome (Score:2)
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he was a bit of a hound
He was a MAN, baby!
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No, the cellular structure isn't intact. And it's not intact for the brain mentioned in TFA. A quick glimpse of the sections indicates that they were stained in a variant of the hemotoxylin / eosin stain - one use commonly in light microscopy but one that doesn't even preserve structure at electron microscopy levels, much less biochemically useful levels of detail.
Remember, the process is something like this: Dead person - checked two or three times to make sure they're dead. No brain function. Drain b
Useful but... (Score:1)
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Don't expect the cost to stay constant. Even the next time could be a lot cheaper, as the software has been written, and computers have gotten faster and cheaper.
OTOH, there are probably limits as to how cheap it can get. I'd be really surprised if it got cheaper than $500,000 during this century, unless there was MASSIVE deflation. That would additionally require robotic surgeons doing and examining the slices, as well as better algorithms (probably rewritten to be more extensively parallel) running on
Ok, now, after seeing that image... (Score:2)
...who else is hungry for cold cuts?
Anyone? Anyone?
Just me, then.
Would make for an interesting (Score:1)
1 TB, but does it fit on a floppy ... (Score:1)
... after running it through gzip?
Done and done (Score:1)
> 7,400 slices
> 1,000 hours
> 10 terabytes of data
> Supercomputers churned away for years
> BigBrain is part of the Human Brain Project, a 10-year,
> €1-billion European initiative to create a supercomputer
> simulation of the human brain
"Done! Wait, hang on. Please tell me this wasn't a murderer's brain?"
"No, this person died in a hospital. 'Abby-someone'."
"Whew."
Link to database website (Score:1)
And the database is here: https://bigbrain.loris.ca/main.php [loris.ca]