Mark Humphries
Jul 28, 2017 · 1 min read

You’ve rather accurately captured the current struggle at the heart of neuroscience.

Capturing all activity from all neurons for a lifetime does seem an absurd goal. It seems that way would lie madness, death by data. And indeed some people have built hyper-detailed models of tiny chunks of brain that are just as hard to understand as the real thing. See my account of the Blue Brain Project here, for example.

Ideally there would be a wealth of theories making quantitative, testable predictions about how neurons operate. But there aren’t.

So to some researchers the solution is to collect more and larger data on neural activity, and hope the answer appears.

Ameliorating this apparent madness, the animals being used have orders of magnitude simpler brains, and live orders of magnitudes shorter than humans. Hence all neurons over a lifetime is feasible. And the hope is that general principles learnt here will scale.

One of the emerging general principles is that we don’t need to know the activity of every neuron to understand a brain (as an example: the Dark Neuron Problem)

The problem is we don’t know in advance which neurons are not important. So we’d have to record them all to find out that in the first place…

Mark Humphries

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Uses his brain to understand brains. Is that possible? Neuroscience: https://humphries-lab.org

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