dENNY
4.8K posts
dENNY retweetet
I worked on the fly connectome for over 6 years, and let me just say that y’all have to slow this hype train way down.
Connectomes are amazing. Biomechanical models are amazing. Linking the two is awesome.
But scientists at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Princeton, and other institutes have been working on this for years now, and it’s not clear to me what’s new in the below.
And connectomes are still missing a LOT of information. We’ve had the connectome of the worm for over 30 years now, and we still can’t reliably simulate a virtual worm.
For example, connectomes don’t capture information about neuromodulator or neuropeptide release sites or receptors. These molecules are constantly changing the properties of neurons in the brain in ways that we have yet to really understand.
And we don’t yet understand animal behavior well enough to refine and/or evaluate whole-brain simulations effectively.
@AdamMarblestone and @doristsao already made many of these points, as well as many other good ones, but I just wanted to also add my two cents.
Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross@alexwg
English
dENNY retweetet
Let me explain why this is absolutely insane.
Scientists just copied a biological brain and made it move inside a computer.
>Researchers scanned a fruit fly brain neuron-by-neuron from electron microscopy data
>The brain contains ~125,000 neurons and ~50 million synapses
>They recreated the entire connectome as a digital brain model
>Then they plugged that brain into a physics-simulated fly body
>Sensory input goes in → the digital brain processes it → motor commands come out
>The simulated fly walks, grooms and behaves like a real fly
>No training. No prompts. No reinforcement learning
>The behavior was already inside the wiring of the brain
This might be the first real step toward uploading minds into computers.
Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross@alexwg
English
