[ExI] World's biggest human brain map unveiled

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 11:59:29AM -0400, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> John Grigg wrote:
>> This is perhaps a baby step toward uploading...
>>   
>> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/04/worlds-first-human-brain-map-u.html
>
> My only problem with this is that it is only really a kind of map ....  

It's only one stage of the project:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/the-human-brain-atlas/

"Jones: Next up for the Allen Institute is a project that focuses 
on the wiring of the brain in the mouse; we’ll again take our 
industrial approaches to build out a highway map of the brain.  
We’re also excited to have recently brought on board our new 
Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Christof Koch.  With him, we’re 
going to be figuring out some future strategies for tackling 
some of the really hard problems in neuroscience related to 
the encoding of information."

> as far as I can make out it tells a lot about gene expression, but not  
> about connectivity, and unfortunately the gene expression story is  
> several steps removed from telling me anything about functionality.

Oh, I disagree. Observing the genetic expression pattern
over space and time tells you a lot about the according
molecular and ultrascale machinery.

You need this information to be able to make sense from
structure. The other part of the puzzle is from in vivo
recording.

You need all of these to have a chance to succeed.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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