Scientists Managed To Completely Map a Baby Fruit Fly's Brain (popularmechanics.com) 34
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: [S]cientists from the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University announced that they'd finally mapped every single neuron and all the connections between them housed inside the brain of a fruit fly larva. The team's research was published this week in the journal Science. "If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought," says Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Joshua T. Vogelstein in a press release. "And the key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other."
And there are a lot of neurons and connections to sort through. To complete this neurological map, scientists had to identify 3,016 neurons. But that pales in comparison to the number of connections between these neurons, which comes to a grand total of 548,000. They also identified 93 distinct neurons that differed in shape, function, and neurological connection. If this all sounds difficult, that's because it is. For 12 years, scientists had to painstakingly slice a brain into thousands of tissue samples, image them with an high-resolution electron microscope, and then piece them back together -- neuron by neuron.
Understanding the inner workings of a fruit fly's brain may seem unrelated to the human mind, but scientists didn't choose this particular species based on its size or perceived simplicity -- rather, fruit flies actually share fundamental biology and a comparable genetic foundation with humans. This makes the map a perfect cornerstone upon which to explore some of the many mysteries of the human mind. "All brains are similar -- they are all networks of interconnected neurons," Marta Zaltic, a co-author on the study, told the BBC. "All brains of all species have to perform many complex behaviors: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, etc."
And there are a lot of neurons and connections to sort through. To complete this neurological map, scientists had to identify 3,016 neurons. But that pales in comparison to the number of connections between these neurons, which comes to a grand total of 548,000. They also identified 93 distinct neurons that differed in shape, function, and neurological connection. If this all sounds difficult, that's because it is. For 12 years, scientists had to painstakingly slice a brain into thousands of tissue samples, image them with an high-resolution electron microscope, and then piece them back together -- neuron by neuron.
Understanding the inner workings of a fruit fly's brain may seem unrelated to the human mind, but scientists didn't choose this particular species based on its size or perceived simplicity -- rather, fruit flies actually share fundamental biology and a comparable genetic foundation with humans. This makes the map a perfect cornerstone upon which to explore some of the many mysteries of the human mind. "All brains are similar -- they are all networks of interconnected neurons," Marta Zaltic, a co-author on the study, told the BBC. "All brains of all species have to perform many complex behaviors: they all need to process sensory information, learn, select actions, navigate their environments, choose food, etc."
An analogy (Score:1)
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Sure. But you need to make steps that are small enough to actually be feasible. And this took 12 years.
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There is the visual6502 project that basically did something like this with the atari (and many other system's) CPU.
Completely reverse engineered every track in the chip with microscope photos etc at a point everything in the chip is now understood and you can "physically" simulate it.
Re:An analogy (Score:4, Informative)
The Visible 6502 ran on the Apple ][ as well. It was the best learning tool ever for understanding how computers work. You could give it some instructions and watch them being executed thru the registers, memory, cpu etc. Slow the system clock or step thru each clock cycle for a detailed look at operations. The 'visible' part was a living animated visual representation of the operations that are normally hidden inside of chips.
If scientists can create a similar digital facsimile of this brain and then stimulate it and watch various possible responses within the neural network, they may more quickly come to a basic understanding of how brains work. The visual aspect makes it fun and it might even be worthwhile to write an app for it and crowdsource potential solutions.
Re: An analogy (Score:3)
Amusingly enough, most neuroscientists believe they know well enough how brains work when it comes to anatomy. This sort of mapping of a brain is called a connectome and is the focus of large groups of researchers, one being the Allen Institute.
There is general acknowledgement that connectomes currently have very little usefulness in themselves, and are instead a necessary step in the development of analytical and experimental techniques needed to advance the state of the art of neuroscience in general.
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The Visible 6502 ran on the Apple ][ as well. It was the best learning tool ever for understanding how computers work. You could give it some instructions and watch them being executed thru the registers, memory, cpu etc. Slow the system clock or step thru each clock cycle for a detailed look at operations.
That does sound awesome. I'm really surprised that no one has built an open source version, or that the original hasn't been made available in emulation, but as far as I can find neither of those has happened. :-(
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Re:An analogy (Score:4, Funny)
Mapping a fruit fly brain is to understanding thought as reverse engineering the circuit board of an Atari is to understanding JavaScript.
Or something like that.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
Time to write an emulator.. (Score:2)
Just like they did with c.elegans
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If you emulate a fruit fly on a Raspberry PI, does it become narcissistic?
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Best Headline Ever! (Score:3)
It reads like 1950's sci-fi.
Fantastic science as well, great job (lot of work as well).
Low-hanging fruit(fly) (Score:2, Funny)
Having destroyed nearly 90% of the immature fruit fly's brain...scientists learned that it still wanted to vote Republican. :-)
OK, I tried to resist. I just couldn't.
Now this is REAL AI research (Score:1)
ChatGPT is not, it is a Chnese Room trick, i.e. fake AI
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This is REAL AI research that might lead to a breakthrough in understanding how we learn and think.
True, but we will only gain understanding of people whose minds are filled with a single particular obsession:
"I smell vinegar!!! I'm heading towards the vinegar!!!"
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"I smell vinegar, which is a combination of acetic acid and water made by a two-step fermentation process! In the style of Shakespeare, you say ? I hie me to the source of that tart smell!!!"
Admitting what I've been saying all along (Score:2)
"If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought," says Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Joshua T. Vogelstein in a press release. "And the key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other."
Now, you all see: we have no idea how 'thinking' works, not in the least, therefore we cannot build machines or write software that has that quality -- therefore all so-called 'AI' is garbage, fakery, untrustworthy -- and if you trust a so-called 'self-driving car' with your safety, you are a fool.
It took them years to just map -- not even begin to understand -- something as tiny as a fruit fly brain. At the rate we're going, we won't really understand how a human brain 'thinks' for centuries.
Better b
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Being right seems rather important to you. More so than everyone knowing you're right?
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Very likely true, but that matters only if you're talking about strong AI [wikipedia.org] which nobody currently is. For many practical tasks, the lack of strong AI likely doesn't matter. You have heard of the Chinese room [wikipedia.org] thought experiment, right?
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Someone either has no reading comprehension whatsoever, or is just a poor, shitty, talentless, garden-variety Internet troll. Go back to 4chan, kid, it's made for the level of shitposting you're doing, mmkay? Let the adults have a conversation in peace, mmkay?
We call him Ricky Ricky Ricky. Everyone you see, is smarter than he...
Once again the one known as Racist Rick snipes out from the shadows in a cowardly attempt to seem cleaver and intelligent. Hiding under the cloak of the anonymous coward he thinks his attempt at deception has succeeded. Little does Racist Rick know that with his room temperature IQ every one easily see through his attempt. While we do miss some of his racist and homophobic comments in his response, we do not fear for we know it wil
Paradox (Score:2)
This is both absolutely, enormously awesome and at the same time disturbingly underwhelming ;).
Miguel Acevedo Ãlvarez beware (Score:2)
News like this just reminds me that fiction like https://qntm.org/mmacevedo [qntm.org] is likely to be fact some day. And that ought to scare any rational person.