Sebastian Seung
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What makes us who we are? Where is our personal history recorded, or our hopes? What explains autism or schiziphrenia or remarkable genius? Sebastian Seung argues that it’s all in the connections our neurons make. In his new book, Connectome , he argues that technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable to start mapping at least portions of the connectome. It’s a daunting task, he says, but without it, neuroscience will be stuck. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Cook: You argue in your book that neuroscience has a fundamental problem. What is the problem?
Seung: Most people are familiar with the regional approach to neuroscience: divide the brain into regions such as the "left brain" and "frontal lobe," and figure out what each region does. This approach has helped physicians interpret the symptoms of brain injuries, but at the same time has frustrating limitations. How do regions carry out their functions? Why do they malfunction in mental disorders? What happens to regions when we learn? We can never obtain satisfying answers to these questions if we consider regions as the elementary, indivisible units of the brain.
An obvious solution is to understand a region by subdividing it into neurons, and figure out how the neurons work together to perform the region's function. This neuronal approach has the potential to answer the big questions above, but so far has not succeeded. In fact, those who study regions sometimes criticize those who study neurons as too focused on minutiae.
Cook: What made you think that there is another way?
Seung: The neuronal approach is finally gathering steam because of technological innovations, especially in genetics and imaging. The nervous systems of animals can now be genetically engineered, allowing researchers to carry out much more precise and conclusive experiments. And there are powerful new methods of looking into the brain to see how neurons signal each other and how they are connected into networks. These developments make neuroscientists optimistic that we are finally going to understand the brain as a network of neurons.
Cook: What do you mean by the connectome?
Seung: A connectome is a map of a neural network. It is like one of those route maps you find in the back of airline magazines. Just replace each city with a neuron, and each route between cities by a connection between neurons. Keep in mind, though, that your brain contains about 100 billion neurons, so your connectome would never fit in the pages of a magazine.
Cook: Are there particular diseases which this research might help understand?
Seung: In brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, neurons degenerate and die. Autopsy reveals that something is visibly wrong with the brain. Yet for many mental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, a clear and consistent pathology of the brain has not been found. Why? Researchers have conjectured that the individual neurons are healthy, but they are connected with each other in an abnormal pattern. Unfortunately, such "miswirings" or "connectopathies" have remained merely hypothetical, because our technologies for mapping neural connections have been too primitive. Imagine what it was like to study infectious diseases before the microscope was invented. You could observe symptoms, but not the microbes that caused disease. Similarly, most mental disorders are still defined only by their symptoms. We need to uncover their causes in the brain, and the new field of connectomics will be important for that.
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Add CommentThe "Connectome" - why that reminds me of the genome! I wonder if it's intended to also remind potential investors and institutions awarding research grants that this is just just like the recently successful mapping of the genome? In product marketing, a catchy name is invaluable...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe attempt to draw the human brain's "Connectome", is a highly valuable idea, that may produce great advances in apparently non-connected sciences, such as computer and microchip construction, finally, neurons are somehow like transistors, dendrites - collecting or way-in sprouts -, soma -body -, and axons - emitting or way-out sprouts - can be regarded as the collector, base and emisor of a transistor, and many times the modulation of neuronal activity is linked to its rate of firing. The word "Connectome" reminds me the "Kinome" used to describe the connections and interactions of different pathways that regulate the cell cycle, and are today the object of "Targeted therapies" for malignancies. The Kinome image is so complex, and so is the possible number of interactions and variants in the pathways,(Finally, many cancer cells find a way to overcome the drugged pathway, and continue growing and replicating), that it seems to me close to the "Gorgona's head", a mythical being whose contemplation lead to immediate death by freezing of the people that watched it. There is also some inherent drawback in connecting human brain structure and its functions: people suffering from Hydrocephalia, a condition in which the internal CNS liquor pressure raises, and blows the brain cavities like a balloon, sometimes reach an advanced state when there's no more brain cortex left than one centimeter or little more, the rest of skull content being a cavity filled by liquid. Those people may have a neurological and cognitive activity not distinguishable form normal subjects. Who can handle this ?. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYUP... the inexorable march toward the body's "final frontier" ... our minds, which is to say our physical brains... the intricate and evolved neural network (NN)... rolls on... at a faster pace that will only accelerate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis project of mapping neurons has been in play in "simpler" animal models, and it's application to the human specie an obvious next step. During neuro-surgery microprobes are used to assess neuronal-anatomic relationships and function as well.
There can be no doubt that we are in fact, our neural networks or "connectomes"... which is obviously where Nature and nurture/experience are entangled. To separate Nature from Nuture was always a false dicotomy.
Similarly, "consciousness problem" is pure myth... and can only be instantiated by our brains (what else?)... the 100 billion neurons with their myriad connections.
In twenty years... we will be in a far different place regarding both basic neuroscience and how genetics/epigenetics shape our NN's and thus our personalities, behaviors and the dysfunction we term "psycho-pathology" or "mental illness".
Good comments! Also, to the extent that some 'software' perhaps recorded in memory controls the flow of various processes, mapping circuit activity may be pointless. I can't imagine attempting to reverse engineer computer software by monitoring the patterns of circuit activity in a multitasking computer. You might be able to locate the 'adder'...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome really smart guy (clearly not me) said the following at the beginning of the computer age:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It is merely a matter of time before every atom in the universe will be quantified."
Reverse engineering the brain may well seem a quaint technology a hundred years hence, perhaps on the order of what the first printing press seems to us today.....
Current cosmological models suggest that only 4% of the mass-energy of the universe can be detected for any quantification. Of that estimated total mass-energy, detectable matter is thought to be 17% of all matter, while 83% is some unidentified type of undetectable matter not predicted by the standard model of particle physics. I think we've got a long way to go before all matter in the universe is quantified, unless we continue to rely entirely on hypothetical estimates, but I suppose it's still "merely a matter of time."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlthough it sounds really super high tech and all-
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissome of your fundamental assumptions are wrong.
First of all- you assume that one thing causes each brain disease. A one to one relationship between cause and pathology. Structure and disease, for example. It's clear all those simple correlations have been found. If you start looking for combinations of things you will have better luck.
Secondly, a lot of brain diseases actually ARE caused by pathogens- really slow common pathogens. Things like Herpes, HSV1- which research shows is intrically involved in the pathology of Alzheimers disease. You ignore this virus because "everyone has it". But people have differing amounts of immunity to HSV, so only some infected people are affected. Combinations of factors my friend.
Mapping the entire brain is a truly commendable activity- but you are elevating it's utility while ignoring other methods.
And for the record, Obsessive-Compulsive disorder causes a tendency to be overconfident. It is caused by Strep Bacteria- you might want to research that a bit too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is time for the public to be told the truth:
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and sporadic Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (sCJD)
are sister prion diseases, transmissible, infectious by medical
equipment, (scopes, etc.) dental and eye equipment, blood, urine, feces,
saliva, mucous (aerosols: possibly by coughs & sneezes) Doctors
frequently misdiagnose AD and sCJD one for the other. The symptoms and
neuropathology are almost identifical.
Right now the US is in the middle of a raging, always fatal, prion
disease epidemic: There are over 6 million victims of AD and 1 million
Parkinson's Disease victims, with a new AD case every 69 seconds !
Recent research (October 2011) by Dr. Claudio Soto, et al, University of
Texas Medical School, has confirmed earlier research which found
injecting Alzheimer's brain material into mice brains caused infectious
prion disease.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111004113757.htm
See Video - Dr. Soto on Alzheimer's disease and prions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtN6hoyTdR4
Then how can people affect/see things at a distance?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPear Labs have proved it more than once to a billion to 1 that it's chance. These science sites wouldn't give credit to this as it is too quack and too far from the middle for them. Funny thing is quack turns out to be the truth in this case and many more if you research it.
The brain doesn't create anything they assume it does. That is a physical materialist view that will be blown away in the next 100 years or maybe sooner depending on when the snowball of info starts a rolling.