Cook: You have an interesting discussion of personal identity. Can you explain how this relates to the connectome?
Seung: I mentioned the hypothesis that certain mental disorders are due to abnormal neural connectivity. We could extend this idea to explain normal mental variation too. Perhaps minds differ because connectomes differ. You have probably heard people say things like, "Johnny's just that way. His brain is wired differently." I say it another way: "You are your connectome." We are the product of our genetic inheritance and our lifetime experiences. Genes have influenced your connectome in many ways--for example, by guiding how your neurons wired together during the development of your brain. Experiences have also modified your connectome, because connections are altered by the neural activity patterns that accompany experiences. To put it another way, your connectome is where nature meets nurture.
Cook: Mapping the connectome seems like an almost impossibly difficult challenge. Critics say that you will may never succeed, or that if you do it will take decades, and we can't put neuroscience on hold for that long.
Seung: Indeed, mapping an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. Just imaging all of a human brain with electron microscopes would be difficult enough. This would yield about one zettabyte of data, which roughly equals the world's current volume of digital content. Then analyzing the images to extract the connectome would be even more demanding. Yet I believe that we will eventually prevail. Success will not come with a sudden bang but rather through sustained growth over time. I imagine that the speed of mapping connectomes will double every year or two. If so, then it will become possible to map an entire human connectome within a few decades. There are similar success stories for other technologies. Computers have improved at this rate for the past half century. DNA sequencing has advanced similarly for the past forty years, and accelerated even further over the past decade.
That being said, such speculation about the far future is just for fun, and is actually beside the point. Even if we never succeed in mapping an entire human connectome, we will learn a tremendous amount by mapping connections in small chunks of human or animal brains. This trend has already begun. Exciting developments in connectomics are happening right now; we don't have to sit around waiting for the future.
Cook: Is there any way the research can be accelerated?
Seung: We invite the public to visit a web site called EyeWire, where you can help map the connectome of the retina, the sheet of neural tissue at the back of the eye. You don't need specialized training to participate, because EyeWire is like a virtual coloring book with pages that are images of the retina. (The images were taken with an electron microscope in the laboratory of our German collaborator, Winfried Denk.) Your task is to color in neurons, and you already know how to do this: just stay inside the boundaries. In this way, you will trace the "wires" of the retina, the branches of its neurons. This is the most laborious task required for mapping a connectome. (Another important task is identifying synapses, the tiny junctions at which neurons communicate with each other.)
EyeWire's coloring book is so vast that no single person could live long enough to manually color the neurons. We have sped up the process in two ways. First, artificial intelligence (AI) does most of the coloring automatically. You just have to guide the AI by a few mouse clicks here and there. Second, the coloring game is fun or even addictive to some people. Perhaps it's because the organic forms of neurons are mesmerizing. Or maybe it's because the game is challenging; at some image locations it can be difficult to decide whether there is a boundary between two neurons, i.e., whether to continue coloring or to stop. EyeWire users tend to improve with practice at such decisions, because they gradually learn from experience how neurons are shaped.
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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.