Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it as an accessible visual explanation of the problem of mapping brain connectivity.
What it is
Sebastian Seung's TED talk introduces the connectome, the map of neural connections he argues defines each person. He explains how mapping it could change how we understand brains and minds.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2013 to 2015.
What Hacker News said
Recommends SapphireSun · 2013-09 · on “Daniel Dennett: The Normal Well-Tempered Mind”
I really like this conception of brains working as internally competing and cooperating ferral units. I'll have to give it some more thought in the morning. I do have an entreaty for you though: In this era of high throughput computing, elegant biotechnology, and the coming of the BRAIN initiative from the national level, I believe the best way to attack the problems of mind/brain right now is hard work and the scientific method. We need more data and we need to analyze it. We're hiring developers for eyewire.org - a game to map the brain by crowd sourcing/gamifying the analysis of electron micrographs of stained retinal slices from mice. We're developing the tools to map the connectome. For
Recommends mentos · 2015-08 · on “Silicon Brain: 100,000 ARM cores [video]”
What technology do we have right now to map the connections of the brain? Is there anything that currently exists with enough granularity to take a snapshot of our neurons and their connections? edit: thanks for the replies, did some research found this TED talk that visualizes the problem pretty well [this video]
Cites christiangenco · 2014-04 · on “Cryonics or why freezing your body could be a good idea”
There's a great Penn & Teller "Bullshit" segment about Cryonics (mildly NSFW; it's Penn & Teller): [LINK] Is it possible? Certainly - the Wood Frog evolved to freeze itself every winter[1] and successfully unthaw itself. It floods its blood with sugars so it doesn't form ice crystals, solving the problem of tissue destruction, then unthaws in the Spring from the outside in and restarts its biological systems. How does modern cryonics solve this problem? Antifreeze. The fluid that poisons you if it enters your system[2]. For you to be revived, then, we'd have to figure out: * how to unthaw your body in a way that won't destroy essential parts of it * how to cure you of Ethylene glycol poisoni