Using AI to develop a fuller model of the human brain
37 comments
·January 25, 2025jsemrau
mettamage
Thanks for the @ArtemKirsanov channel. I'm really enjoying his video on "How I make science animations" [1]. That's some cool Python & After Effects. I've always wanted to know how to go about it, especially since I have enough experience with Python and some experience with Sketch/Figma.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaa13eehgzo&ab_channel=Artem...
Daneel_
3Blue1Brown also has a good video on mathematical animations, in case it’s relevant for you: https://youtu.be/rbu7Zu5X1zI?si=KTAfolRBm1NsZOE9
thro1
( to some level - not only every neuron in the brain has unique DNA and ancestorship:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surpri... - Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aab1785 - Somatic mutation in single human neurons tracks developmental and transcriptional history
- but what if there could be other levels - if somehow connected - like e.g. (2025) of traveling [between cells] mitochondria fling DNA into our brain cells :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42808418
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3810443/ - Structural and biomechanical basis of mitochondrial movement in eukaryotic cells
https://www.earth.com/news/mitochondria-fling-dna-into-our-b... - Mitochondria fling DNA into our brain cells, making us age faster
worth to look into - like.. are that maybe not junk but real messages than can modify the brain inner working in.. different ways ?? (..and more reasons (than maybe.. stress?? ) for them to.. - or why they travel (those.. symbionts - ..of energy?? ) ? - is it smart ? - or just alien ? ) ;)
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elif
We're gonna be taking the machines word for it sooner than we want to.
Either that or we will have to severely retard progress to human pace.
suddenlybananas
This is total snake oil.
robwwilliams
Or PR happy talk.
hall0ween
Using AI to blankety blank
eden-u4
When they say "in 20-50 years" it is implied that it might not exist ever. See nuclear fusion or AGI.
listic
Where should I look for a more technical description of exactly what they are doing?
nikolayasdf123
check http://neuroscience-landscape.com/
this is list of software, hardware, and other material on neuroscience
UCSF is big part of BRAIN Initiative lead by Allen Institute, many of the tools and their work is collected in Open Neuroscience Foundation
caycep
i think eddie chang's paper on voice synthesizing is published, i forget if it was nature or neuron. it's prob on pubmed but i'm too lazy/sleepy to pull it. doris tsao and a number of collaborators have a few nice papers out w ML applications to single unit/LFP recordings
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dr_dshiv
They can now capture the activity of hundreds of neurons! That’s simultaneously amazing and so, so far from being able to create the digital twin they claim.
solidr53
Amazing, there are estimated 86 billion neurons in the human brain, so they are just short of 85 billion and change.
But I think there is more to it, how many are used for speech vs vision, how much is used for motor control. If the idea is to build a speech neuron activity to some sort of ml data representation it's probably way less than 85b.
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cess11
Found two PubPeer posts, did someone else find more?
https://pubpeer.com/publications/829F2657E307C1D8E5623363476...
https://pubpeer.com/publications/C85230FD7895218EAAA34F6C675...
allears
Ethical considerations are briefly discussed at the end of the article -- too briefly, in my opinion.
echelon
We're alive for an infinitesimal blink of an eye before an eternity of annihilation. Brain science is still in the stone age. We should be flooring it with the research. Absolutely flooring it.
HeatrayEnjoyer
Death is a blessing that may not always exist
echelon
If endgame entities have control over the entire light cone, they can bend backwards and pluck you out of space and time and put you into an eternal hell simulator.
I wouldn't worry about what could or couldn't be.
hall0ween
I agree neuroscience still in the stone age. Flooring the research I don’t think will do much to change it. It’s like flooring plasma physics research during the renaissance. We need different patterns of thinking, imo. Two examples come to mind: (1) our interest to boil down neural dynamics via quantization (what else would it look like, you may wonder. and exactly my point!) and (2) studying the brain in artificial environments. it’s like look at fish behavior while they’re in a tube in space
echelon
We need to stop thinking of human bodies as anything more than machines, and we need to start growing them in labs.
Conscious humans are obviously special. But if we grew non-thinking bodies and used them for research, we could vastly accelerate medical science, research and development, and treatments. We could accomplish this with gene knockouts.
It's too "icky" for people, so it hasn't been done.
yapyap
ugh, ROLLS EYES
if I could embed a video on HN I would, such bullshit.
This person probably saw the nonsensical amounts of money that was being thrown at shitty AI vcs and thought “I can put on a performance like that”
iamleppert
The self-congratulatory tone and constant shilling of the author’s career (they are a nobody who hasn’t done anything meaningful despite the pedigree) makes me nauseous. The headshots and such make me think this is a ploy for easy (dumb) VC money.
The association with UCSF is touted but based on my experience, it’s nothing to brag about!
cma
Don't all university press magazine things have this kind of imagery? Seems very common and not really telling you anything at all.
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This is one of my favorite YT channels working on a similar research without all the fluff: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtemKirsanov
Also have a look at Michael Levin's work : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+levin