Connecting Connectomes
Understanding connectedness
I recently read about this new term “connectome“ which describes the comprehensive set of neuronal connections of a species' central nervous system. Understanding human brain has always been the most fascinating activity for human brains for centuries. This shows that a brain is trying to study itself for thousands of years and still not able to reach far, instead, in the journey, the brain itself did many other inventions and discoveries and went beyond.
Nearly 100 years ago, physicist Emerson Pugh famously said, “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
Studying about brain and its many factions has been very exciting for me as well for a very long time. Brain is a complex thing. Even though its fascinating to learn about it, sometimes my brain gets confused about so many things other brains have found to study itself.
Hallucination is a thing here and it’s literally difficult to avoid. I asked chatGPT about the same and it threw so many things.
Why do we want to make it so difficult or is it actually difficult. To me, it feels like, brain is playing conspiracy theory with humans for centuries and is telling us to discover all these things to make it more complicated, as if we are not in our control to study it well enough.
Every discipline mentioned above is a domain of its own and has billions of dollars invested to understand to actually scratch the surface. The same money could have done wonders for lot of other things like Ozone repair, Poverty, Immunization. It seemed we are very much into the game of getting lost and getting nowhere. Are we playing the game of delayed gratification and hedging long-termism.
Money moves the world and I failed to understand the above argument unless i saw this.
This is huge, and this shows the the brain research spending is actually more on non drug therapies which are mostly related to behavioural interventions in treating brain disorders. Well, so basically, drug research spending related to brain is actually far less. This concludes we are still far away to understand what the hell the real moat “the brain” is.
On the flip side, finally, a big tech, i.e., Google along with few others is able to slice out a few mm of dead brain cells, yeah, a dead brain cell to study human brain and cooked a dataset out of it which they call H-01. H01 is a 1.4 petabyte volume of a small sample of human brain tissue.
The dataset comprises roughly one cubic millimeter of imaging data, including tens of thousands of reconstructed neurons, millions of neuron fragments, 183 million annotated synapses, 100 proofread cells, and many additional subcellular annotations and structures (from the website itself, A Browsable Petascale Reconstruction of the Human Cortex). That’s just way too heavy for a mortal like me to understand. I just copied pasted the sentence from above portal. Seriously, we are even not getting started yet, forget the surface.
Very interesting research and a humongous collaboration.
Chandelier neuron, beautiful isn’t it.
The above pictures are taken from browsable gallery where statistical research about one cubic millimeter brain is dumped and comprises of lot many other details. Now just consider, this is just a dead splice of a brain that took so much of imaging infrastructure and other paraphernalia to study, without a consciousness. What will the grandeur when this 1 mm is studied with consciousness and same studies are done. A different domain though. We are talking of 86 billion neurons, and nearly a quadrillion synapses here.
Einstein said “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.“
Thought process may need to have a new dimension to understand a complex substance such as human brain. Calling human brain a substance is also demeaning though, what should we even call it, a mind, a civilisation, a space, God complex, a macrocosm, a rabbithole, the punk portal, event horizon or a infinite memory organism, there may be many definitions that helps us see what we see, helps us feel what we feel and experience our existence in this earth. Its more than just a substance. Its more than just a matter, it may be a route to consciousness. Yeah, I may be high and rambling now but I feel, human endeavour to understand human brain is a futile attempt because the approach itself is raw without a religion, without empathy, without a soul.
Open questions are too much!!
We don have enough info about how many types of neurons are there
How do they even interact
Synapse is like a million transistors at one go
Overall infra to study human brain may exhaust all the bitcoin mill power in the world, not feasible, we can still study in parts but never as a whole
1 cubic mm of brain sampling causing billions of dollars of research efforts and not very meaningful
I would like to know where are we headed, how are we headed and when will this mad rush end. Human brains trying to understand a human brain without a consciousness is like running a radio without a battery.
In the upcoming posts, we will do deep dive in more harder questions and some more interesting facts and figures around brain.
Human brain is fascinating, isn’t it and more when so many brains trying to understand one :).