Neuroscientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED

my name is Bobby Kasturi I'm a assistant professor at the University of Chicago and a neuroscientist at Argonne National Labs what the connectome is is it's a kind of a newly made-up term for describing a kind of neuroscience research where we try to map the brain at a scale that's never been back before every person here can leave with understanding it at some level do you know why we're here today yes we're gonna talk about science and we're gonna talk about a very specific kind of science about people who study brains did you know what a brain is what is it definitely so we're gonna talk about this is something that people study in the brain called the connectome do you know that your body is made up of really tiny things called cells okay well there's more cells in your brain like way more cells and then all the stars we can see and so what the connectome is is we'd like to know where every cell in your brain is and how it talks to every other cell in your brain that was awesome Daniel thank you connectome connectome to be honest I have no idea that's good that's a great place to start there are cells in your brain those brain cells are connected by wires to each other electricity travels down those wires and communicates from one part of the brain to the other part of the brain and each of those brain cells makes you know a thousand connections something like a hundred trillion connections in one brain in your brain could I take all of that information and put it inside a computer would that computer then be you computers they don't have fillings they won't have fillings and I think that's one thing that makes the human race wrong I would say that that map also has your feelings in it because here's why your feelings most neuroscientists think come from your brain anyway and amazingly weather when you feel happy or sad or angry or scared that's just brain cells communicating with each other so I think today we're going to talk about a connecting yeah no it's a map of all the connections between every neuron in your brain literally in a human brain something like the map of the one quadrillion connections that a hundred billion neurons make with each other is this like a map where that's like an actual visual representation like using microscopy or just data Wow well I'm understanding more so that it's these these the a mapping of the nerve the the circuitry the pathways between neurons that can lead to evidence of patterns in your brain that are common between different people we have to use electron microscopes and then we have been developing our ways to slice the brain into really thin slices use an electron microscope to take a picture of each slice and then use computers to put it all back imagine that we could get the map of every connection right and we knew how neurons fired do you think we could put that in a computer that map and then therefore that computer should be able to think just like the brain that we extracted it from well the computer only communicates with itself in binary so it only has two options it can only ask itself yes-or-no questions but a human brain has an infinity of directions that it can go neurons are also digital meaning a neuron either fires or it doesn't fire so that's either one or zero and it's the combination of those ones or zeros that actually produce the 10,000 different answers that you say it's a large-scale attempt to understand the wiring map of the brain definitely great I think that it's definitely needed ha understanding the anatomy of the brain is definitely important but it doesn't necessarily tell us everything about the function so there's some sort of temporal order from neuron to neuron and region to region that we may not be able to pick up this is where it gets really crazy could we simulate that map inside a computer and would that computer then be thinking like that original brain for which we made the map I mean that's not that's not the person I mean having a representation of someone's neural network is just that it's just a representation of their neural network because there's more to the to you in here than just information passing between neurons I'd like to think so huh it would be like if you simulated a hurricane imagine we can keep track of every variable of a hurricane wind speed every water molecule etc etc temperature and we put that inside a super-fast computer and we simulated right I don't think anyone would think that the inside of the computer would get wet even though we had simulated the hurricane perfectly that wetness is consciousness is what we are is it ethical to imagine mapping a male brain versus a female brain to look for differences between those two explain alleged behavioral differences between them every single person is different and so it should be okay to map every single person's brain I mean I understand that there are that it's very sensitive you know you're sensitive mapping in Indian brain versus a Caucasian brain or politically I think that people may have some issue with mapping out what causes or what makes a difference between huh different types of people maybe a wiring diagram is not sufficient to understand the brain and it would be crazy to think that that would be sufficient actually if you limit the connect them to be just the wiring diagram without you know more information about myelination or glial cells correct all types of environmental features that surround the neurons and axons then then you have an incomplete picture right no no sometimes when people get they worry about connectomics I think what they're actually worrying about is that it's the end of the way that we used to do neuroscience what do you think about memory do you think that there's ways of resolving the substrate of human memories you know is it just LTP and OCD I'm not sure if you had a connect home of a human brain of an adult human I would be able to read out memories from that you don't think it's just the synaptic weights like a an artificial neural network that's trying to do a particular it could absolutely be but without knowing what the weights were before the memory was made what if you had a violinist learn a piece of Bach music yes could you find those notes somewhere in their brain yes I didn't know before yes you know at I'm a musician and I don't think it's possible I think that there are too many you know so much of it is associative to what you already know uh-huh and as a musician how much of it do you think is in your hands versus in your brains meaning like you do have connections in your muscles from the nerves that are from your spinal cord what if some of the learning is there are you still doing yeah more yeah and we do a lot of x-ray in addition to II M and this is actually I'm not saying it's the only problem but it's the only problem that needs to be solved right away is that the data analysis right in fact I think we calculated that there aren't enough humans ever to map a mouse brain wherever you collect every connection and etc so the problem is to get algorithms to to trace to recognize things in brains the way humans recognize things in brains or map things trace things in brains it's gonna cost a lot of money to imagine setting the gold standard for the wiring diagram even once and that's what I'm those are the kinds of ethical concerns that I'm worried about one of the things that we're not doing well as a field is sort of educating and telling people beyond our field the benefits of what we could achieve but I'm impressed that when you talk to people about something that seems kind of crazy and outlandish and perhaps they hadn't been talking about before it doesn't take them long to come to a kind of considered opinion especially children I think it's kind of amazing I mean I do hope that more people talk about brains and what we use brains for and the ways that we should use our brains so I think this field has the opportunity to make that more real

Channel: WIRED

Views: 3,674,678

Rating: 4.9396086 out of 5

Keywords: brain, explainer, neuroscience, science, scientist, wired, explanation, connectome, neuroscientist, bobby kasthuri, bob kasthuri, dr. kasthuri, argonne national laboratory, argonne, science explanation, study of the brain, neural map, explaining, connectdome entrepreneur, connect, dome, 5 levels, 5 levels of, 5 levels of difficulty

Id: opqIa5Jiwuw

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/vinnvout]

I think the Entrepreneur is right in a way. Even if we did map out an entire brain, we wouldn't have the whole representation of the person we are mapping. The brain isn't a discrete separate entity. Our brains are constantly receiving signals from the rest of our body and sending out signals. Those signals change how the neurons fire in the brain. Also, not all of our neurons are identical. Some fire easily, while others have a high threshold needed to fire. This would be a very complex project to accomplish, but it should be eventually possible with our increase in processing power in computers.

[u/always_reading]

I really liked this video. First, the idea of mapping out all neuron connections in a brain and then potentially uploading that map into a computer is fascinating. But mostly, I really enjoyed the 5 levels format.

[u/metalmagician]

I love the 5 levels of explanation, but I question the idea presented.

He spoke of mapping every neuron and every connection between neurons, but is that a proper level of measurement? To properly Simulate a person, would it need to be with sub-synaptic measurements?

On a broader scale, a simulated brain would invariably appear somewhat similar to the original, but would there be a point where we are unable to determine a difference between the two, should one exist?

[u/DiggSucksNow]

He didn't talk about things like seratonin, melatonin, etc. If you can't model chemicals that affect brain state, you have an incomplete model.

[u/Sirmcblaze]

i think more concepts need to be explained in this format. beautifully done.

[u/diqbeut]

The hurricane example he used was really fascinating. Before hearing it put that way I thought of consciousness as just the activity of the brain and our experience of it. That may or may not be the case, but I think comparing it to the "wetness" of the real hurricane and how it obviously wouldn't be replicated in the reproduced system is a really interesting way to think about it.