DerAlte
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Spectacular brain images reveal surprisingly simple structure
Fascinating images:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46897519/ns/technology_and_scien...
Der Alte
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Magpie
lab constructor
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Very interesting! No one likely foresaw that this network would turn out to be so simple and logical because the brain just looks like a blob of
protoplasm at the macroscopic level.
This is essentially a 3-D Cartesian coordinate system. I first realized its power on a practical level when riding the subways of Paris. I could
travel from any place to any other place with just one train change. Very impressive.
How does this compare to the internet superhighway?
The single most important condition for a successful synthesis is good mixing - Nicodem
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franklyn
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Thanks you made my day
Same Image of Homer here _
Attachment: phpjpF2v8 (28kB)
This file has been downloaded 505 times
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peach
Bon Vivant
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The way the branches stick up into the cortex remind me of Purkinje cells:
I have had a go in an MRI as part of a research project (which meant lying in it for about 2h, and purposefully lying in the other sense to some of
the questions I was being asked). It's a strange experience indeed to be standing around in a hospital gown at 11am, scrolling through my own face and
onwards into the centre of my brain.
I tried to get a copy of the images from them but for some reason they weren't having that. Information can't get much more personal than photos of my
insides. 
Probably locked away in the ScienceDirect vault by now.
[Edited on 1-4-2012 by peach]
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Pulverulescent
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The early joke gets the . . .
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"
A Einstein
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nora_summers
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The simplicity of the brain is quite remarkable. I hope this brings us a step closer to brain download. I've always wanted to download myself into a
new body 
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Endimion17
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Simplicity? Is that a joke or what? 
As the first sentence in the article says: "Stunning new visuals of the brain reveal a deceptively simple pattern of organization in the wiring of
this complex organ."
That couldn't be more true.
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peach
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You'd want a MEG scanner (or similar) for that.
I have wondered if SQUID elements could be produced that could be implanted within the skull. They are physically small devices, but require cryogenic
temperatures.
MIT demonstrated a microscopic superconducting thermoelectric element a while ago. Coupled to a SQUID element and encapsulated in a tiny vacuum bulb,
that could be implantable; which is important in terms of the magnetic field strength, which rapidly dies off with distance. And distortion caused by
the skull it's self.
At present, a MEG scanner needs about 10,000 simultaneous depolarisation events for it to register on the element. It's temporal resolution, however,
far exceeds fMRI, as the measurement is the actual depolarisation (the magnetic field produced) rather than a secondary event (e.g. blood flow to a
comparably large section of the brain).
Another issue is that MEG scanning is entirely one directional; it only reads. Magnetic stimulation of the brain is in the prehistoric era in terms of
it's spatial resolution.
The other option being to grow organic semiconductors into contact with the neurons, using tags on their ends to bind them to the docking sites at the
nodes or synapses; where they could listen in, directly, to the depolarisations going past (as per tapping a wire). As far as I'm aware, no one has
actually attempted that. One such organic semiconductor is melatonin, a natural component of the brain tissue as is. It was also the first organic
semiconductor used to build a transistor. Melatonin is a byproduct of seratonin metabolism, and is implicated in the circadian cycle (response to
light / consciously alert / asleep). Another function it plays is as a free radical scavenger within the brain.
Fibre optics can already carrying orders of magnitude more data through a single thread than the entire human spinal cord. Holographic CD's could
store around 10 to 15 minutes worth of all of this data without any form of compression involved. As most of the information is constant, lossless
compression would likely squeeze that towards an hour or more. If you look at MP3's, humans are happy to compress things (lossey) ten times (a WAV is
about 60mb, whereas an acceptable MP3 is about 6mb). So you are already looking at the possibility of recording hours / a full days worth of spinal
cord information with already existing technology there; on a single holographic CD (terabytes per disc). There are already plans in the works to
boost holographic discs by storing the data in cages containing individual atoms. Using Bose-Einstein condensates would boost the storage capacity
again, by orders of magnitude. The data is also locked, by it's quantum probability, into a retention time of something like hundreds of thousands to
millions of years, before it needs refreshing.
[Edited on 1-4-2012 by peach]
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nora_summers
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Quote: Originally posted by Endimion17  | Simplicity? Is that a joke or what?
As the first sentence in the article says: "Stunning new visuals of the brain reveal a deceptively simple pattern of organization in the wiring of
this complex organ."
That couldn't be more true. |
I'm sorry i didn't mean it *that* way.
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