Scans reveal intricate brain wiring | Hacker News Reader

Scans reveal intricate brain wiring

bbc.co.uk

69 pointshaven19 comments

Raw data!

http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/2012/01/first-public-r...

It's unfortunate that you have to apply for access. Why force people to jump through hoops? Expose this data.

From http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/data/ - "You are asked to read and agree to the terms in the HCP Data Use Agreement and provide some basic information about your research."

This seems pretty normal from my experience with research data sets. Note that this is being released to the scientific research community, not the public at large.

Maybe they do not want to happen to the public image of brain research what happened to the public image of AOL after AOL released to the public a few tens or hundreds or megs of search queries for research purposes.

You mean someone will combine this with the netflix database and will proceed to de-anonymize this based on what they were thinking during the scan?

The AOL data release was a total fiasco in that it wasn't anonymized properly and because they were not aware of the state of the art.

And it is not like they are not releasing it, they are releasing it! Just not on an instantaneous download.

As for AOL, I'm quite grateful they did what they did, I got quite a bit of mileage out of their data.

>You mean someone will combine this with the netflix database and will proceed to de-anonymize this based on what they were thinking during the scan?

There is a saying on the web site Less Wrong that "nobody knows what science does not know." In other words, people tend to be too quick to leap to the conclusion that a particular feat involving science is impossible.

I also note that you have no personal stake in the question. If your scientific career or your ability to continue to win research grants were at risk, you might not be so confident in your belief that it would be impossible for anyone to misuse the data in a way that harms your reputation or the reputations of people you depend on or care about.

(There is a small chance I could be wrong in inferring that that is indeed your belief, in which case, ignore the above.)

Note that I am not asserting that the researchers should limit distribution of the data or that doing so would have net positive effect on society. I am just saying that is a rational decision for researchers who care about their careers to make.

I think that being careful with medical data is an excellent idea. At the same time I can't see any harm coming from releasing this particular data as long as it has absolutely no meta data associated with it. Just the raw scans should be enough to satisfy anybody's curiosity. If they need more for whatever reason then they should have their credentials and needs checked on a case-by-case basis.

Mis-use of such data would require at least a hypothetical scenario, and stating that would bolster the reason why the data was not released without restriction.

But better safe than sorry.

>As for AOL, I'm quite grateful they did what they did, I got quite a bit of mileage out of their data.

So did I.

"Only 50 such scans have ever been done."

"The aim the $40m programme is to map the entire human neural wiring system by scanning the brains of 1,200 Americans."

Look at what happened with DNA sequencing[1]. Linear extrapolation isn't always the best predictor of progress.

[1] http://www.dnasequencing.org/history-of-dna

Awesome, this kind of things really amaze me. I'm just curious what are the possibilities once they have everything scanned. Yes we can probably cure some disease or fix some stuff, but that's kind of old news, I am more interested in what they can actually do. Can they upload new language into your brain? or what else?

Perhaps you just worded that sloppily, but why do you consider curing "some disease", like, say, schizophrenia or Alzheimer's, would not be "actually doing" something?

Yes I did probably word it wrong, of course to cure these diseases is awesome, but we kind of know what the potential is there, I am more interested in what other potentials, apart from diseases, are there

Well, thinking of the usual state-corporate world priorities, first they will say that the possible benefits of such research is "curing brain diseases".

Then they will forget about that (maybe after selling some unnecessarily expensive brain disease cure's to the rich) and proceed to use it for military and population control purposes.

Well, you could analyze how the human brain performs tasks that computers can't seem to do very nicely (either because our algorithms to do those tasks aren't very good, or because of some sort of inherent limitation). Among these tasks are image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, etc. Imagine the possibilities: you could get up in the morning, step inside of your autonomous vehicle, ask it to "drive me to work, but stop at a good coffee shop first", and have it drive you to your destination in the middle of a hurricane. Or alternatively, you could datamine the shit out of everything that ever existed.

The last part is probably just wishful thinking. I ended up writing a research paper on this topic last year, and those issues I listed are actually the ones I saw most frequently listed as the possible applications of advances in neural and cognitive sciences.

When that day will come many people will not have jobs xD just saying..

This TED video is a good explanation of the concept of a "connectome" for the layman: http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html

The simple connectome of c. elegans has been mapped, and there is an open source project to use this dataset and other data to run a full simulation of the worm in a virtual environment: http://openworm.org

Pretty cool.

I wonder what fraction of the wiring in the brain these represent.

I guess these are only the largest "pathway" structures?

Can't imagine what those few thick rendered wires represent in a brain. Do they stand for signals by strength? Why can't we see how they terminate? Why are the bundles seemingly unconnected with one another?

I didn't get any insight from that graphic. For $40M I hope they have some better results than that.

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