Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

Related:

* Fruit Fly Brain Observatory https://www.fruitflybrain.org/#/posts/explore_ffbo which lets you visualize and explore datasets

* Neurokernel http://neurokernel.github.io/ - open source software which "aims to build an open software platform for the emulation of the entire brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster on multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)." See also: http://www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu/projects/neurokernel

The recent work being published on this is pretty wild:

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7614541/ (summaries: https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/wiring-map-reveals-how-lar... and https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/complet...)

Oh, and just in case people haven't read this, I'll just drop this short story from a few years ago Lena (MMacevedo): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo - like with AI, I think science fact will be rapidly catching up w/ fiction soon.

That paper is incredible. It’s crazy that they found 41% of all DN connections receive recurrent feedback from a downstream neuron.

Some things that may be commonplace understanding in the neuroscience community but that I found interesting:

- speculation that deep recurrence in the learning center is a mechanism for working memory, and allows for multiple high-level cognitive processes to occur simultaneously

- the description of how a variety of neurons in the learning center categorize stimuli, a different group controls the learned value of inputs (valence?), and then another group integrates the valences of both the learned and innate neuron groups for the given stimulus category

Oh, and that most of the neurons were engaged in multi-modal activity

Is it now possible to accurately model the behavior of a C. elegans from its neural connectome?

Nowhere near, and its connectome has been known for decades.

Very interesting!

A question from a layman: what is a “signal” in the context of a neuron? Is it discrete binary ON/OFF, or is it discrete with multiple levels, or is it fully analog? Do we know the “encoding” of the signals? What do they represent?

My understanding was that it is an analog signal of current. The voltage of which spikes when the Neuron fires. The signal travels along the dendrites and may boost or deactivate other neurons.

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