[HN Gopher] Neuroscientists roll out first comprehensive atlas o...
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Neuroscientists roll out first comprehensive atlas of brain cells
Author : conse_lad
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-10-12 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.berkeley.edu)
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Amazing!
| swashbuck1r wrote:
| Are there any examples of "Hello World!" with simulated basic
| brain cells? I'm sure this is an entirely naive question given
| the complexity of a brain, but I'm imagining a rudimentary
| program to help understand brain-style processing with some kind
| of brain cell struct unit that represents real-ish input/output
| mechanisms that can be connected to other brain cell struct
| units...leading to some minimal brain-style processing outcomes.
| markenqualitaet wrote:
| I think you _vastly_ overestimate our current understanding of
| the brain /neuronal processing, even singular (neuron) cell's
| workings. The fMRI enthusiasm turned out wrong a long time ago
| and there hasn't been much progress since, for all I know. And
| knowing a gene sequence wasn't enough either. We are still
| lacking theory big time. For most all of biology, we do not
| understand anything fully really. Not in neuro science, not in
| evolution theory, and god forbid not in genetics. Complex !=
| complicated. Complexity is a hard barrier. We do not have
| abstraction for emergence, merely still recording thing's
| reactions when you poke them in different ways.
| andyxor wrote:
| If you want to understand how the brain works this is a good
| intro with some realistic neuronal network models ( spoiler:
| these have nothing to do with "artificial neural nets" as we
| know them) https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Computations-Edmund-T-
| Rolls/dp/...
| tediousdemise wrote:
| The Human Brain Project is a somewhat failed experiment to
| understand the brain in its entirety. They started by taking
| human brain cross sections and imaging them down to neuronal
| resolution, but the scans took up so much space that there
| wouldn't be enough capacity on the entire planet to store a
| complete human brain scan. This is a challenge of compression
| inasmuch as it is a challenge of understanding brains.
|
| I question if progress in any given field X is completely and
| unequivocally hindered by progress in a dependent field Y. If
| this is the case, dependencies better be known up front before
| embarking on any project, unless you like wasting time and
| money.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _some kind of brain cell struct unit_
|
| Ray Kurzweil presents one theory about the basic neuronal
| modules in _How to Create a Mind_ (2012). The text is of course
| controversial - criticism may be as important as the tentative
| idea presented.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| About simulation: we do have simulators of brains (to some
| extent). The main example is the simulation of the C. Elegans.
| One such simulator is on GitHub at
| https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation
|
| The problem is, well before tackling the human brain - with
| functional units, wiring, evolutionary rewiring1, modules,
| multiform glias and mysteries in general etc. - that of
| _transparency_ , i.e. already in the C. Elegans you can see
| complex behaviour in the studied system, but the hard part,
| that of understanding why and how that structure presents that
| behaviour, is unachieved. It is still a "black box" like some
| ANNs. We know the structure of the C. Elegans since 1985, but
| we still do not know well "why it works, why it works that
| way": the "scientific problem" of understanding the "natural
| phenomenon" we found, in order to export that understanding, is
| still pending.
|
| So: we have simple brains described, they are simulated, and to
| just look at them will not make you much wiser until you really
| manage to "crack the code". There is not really an <<Hello
| World>> yet. It does not mean your doctoral efforts could not
| achieve it though!
|
| --
|
| 1 Evolutionary rewiring: the human nervous system is also made
| by "afterthought" increases which overlapped on pre-existing
| structures "patching" them, instead of "correcting,
| reprogramming" them - so one will find a system that may show
| to be a masterpiece of cleverness but not a masterpiece of
| planning. In other words, the human brain is something
| relatively messy, not a clean blueprint.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| This feels easily related to lack of unified physical
| theories.
|
| We seem to find structure all over but no idea why it ended
| up just this way.
|
| My guess is a link between field effects and information
| coming off cells. Cells emit information instigating a field
| reaction but only to a certain point as a survival mechanism.
|
| Once an equilibrium is reached the cells radiate new
| information to inhibit the field effect?
|
| Which makes me wonder if cells not being able to inhibit
| field effects is related to aging.
|
| I picked the wrong field in college. Math was fun but the
| kind of abstract that almost feels useless a lot of the time,
| and biotech really feels like the final frontier anymore.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| > https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation
|
| Does it have microtubules?
|
| >#define RANDF() (double)rand() / RAND_MAX
|
| Looks like they tested indeterminism, but it's not used in
| the final version.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| So I expected this to be about the human brain since sites like
| http://mousebrain.org/ already existed, but it looks like it's
| research that has been done on mice brains as well? Can someone
| explain the differences here?
| stenl wrote:
| Hey vanderZwan, we have a paper in the collection (there's 17
| brain atlas papers in this issue of Nature) on human, marmoset
| and mouse motor cortex (my group did the human). I think it's
| cool that pretty much all the cell types could be aligned
| between those species, which diverged 90 million years ago.
|
| Our full human brain cell type atlas is work in progress but
| hopefully we'll post the preprint early next year.
|
| (Edit) Direct link to the papers, which are all open access:
| https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/598/issues/7879
| pamplemoose wrote:
| the headline is attention seeking since there are numerous pre-
| existing brain atlases that describe the
| anatomy/cellular/molecular parts in different ways. You can
| check https://portal.brain-map.org/ for many examples.
|
| I think a good comparison to this kind of work is what has
| happened previously in astronomy, where scientists work to
| answer their specific questions using large open datasets
| acquired using shared infrastructure (fancy telescopes for
| astronomy, microscopes for biology).
|
| Here is some more ongoing work from the Allen institute where
| you can make a scientific proposal for their openscope
| (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-
| science/research...)
| mrweasel wrote:
| Neuroscience is fascinating, well at least the part about image
| processing, but it's also completely inaccessible. From computer
| science and programming we are use to having introduction
| available in the form of articles, videos and cheap training. For
| Neuroscience it's just straight up hard-mode and you don't know
| any of the words. I still not even completely sure what a brain
| atlas is.
|
| I've seen a few free university courses, but they fill up almost
| immediately.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| YT, for example, contains many resources on brain anatomy and
| more. Plus, for example, the lessons from Robert Sapolsky at
| Stanford.
|
| Plus, there exist the primer books from Rita Carter (first of
| all, _Mapping the Mind_ ).
|
| There are loads of good material around. Note though, that CS
| is "forward" engineering, while Brain Science is _backward_
| engineering. So, if you do not find material that build from
| the ground up... it is easily because we are not at that level.
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