> A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720 connections.)
We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances to figure it out.
Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The information is necessary but far from sufficient.
no one but sebastian seung and his gang of hacks actually thinks this. the connectome is but a very useful, _very_ expensive tool.
and, actually as of writing, we have a connectome for the _adult_ drosophila brain (more than one actually). two orders of magnitude larger, 200,000 neurons.
neuroscience discussions on orange website are always a sight to behold but, uh, even more so than the connectome (we spent $50M peeling atomically thin layers off the most important fly to have ever lived and then hundreds of man years annotating it) the techniques of modern neuroscience would blow people away. we routinely image from the entire drosophila brain at several hertz, while it is running on a virtual reality treadmill using biological sensors genetically engineered to be expressed in a specific subset of neurons.
> A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720 connections.)
We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances to figure it out.
Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The information is necessary but far from sufficient.