In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice
by ilene - January 2nd, 2011 10:24 pm
Mapping the brain at the connectome level seems daunting, but it’s an exciting step in understanding how our brains work. As noted in the article, the connectome is a series of static images, so it would seem that the next stage, perhaps massively more complicated, would be studying the connectome’s action in time. – Ilene
In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice
By ASHLEE VANCE, NY Times
Excerpts:
Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind.
The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.
[...]
Dr. Lichtman estimates it will be several years before they can contemplate a connectome of a mouse brain, but there are some technological advances on the horizon that could cut that time significantly. Needless to say, a human brain would be far more complex and time-consuming.
“Hopefully, we are returning with a burst of new energy to the question of how the brain is wired up,” said Gary S. Lynch, a well-known brain researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “Lacking a blueprint, we’re never going to get anywhere on the most profound and fun questions that drew everyone to neuroscience in the first place: what is thought, consciousness?”
Full article here: Seeking the Connectome, a Mental Map, Slice by Slice – NYTimes.com.
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How your brain remembers the future
by ilene - April 2nd, 2010 12:01 pm
Déjà vu, all over again.
How your brain remembers the future
By NewScientist
IT’S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.
Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. "The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK.
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The finding supports the "Bayesian brain" theory, which sees the brain as making predictions about the world which it updates when new information comes in.
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Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain
by ilene - July 14th, 2009 10:55 pm
Here’s a fascinating New Scientist article on how your brain works, swinging back and forth between order and chaos, neurons firing away in a blizzard of random activity. – Ilene
Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain
By David Robson
HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?
Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.
Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.
In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence…
Full article here.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.