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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0

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The MIT & Harvard medical school and CS had a joint project called something like the Brain initiative to collect that combining results from:

- inferences of neuron interactions from electronic wiring individual neurons in mice brains;

- fMRI and tFMI (a mathematical extension that associates area that are activated one after the other) on live humans;

- scanning ultra-thin slices (volunteer human brain donor) and using that for an neuron-to-synapse complete map of at least one brain. Both the slicing technology and the AI to re-combine images into not just a 3D model, but a complete connectron are pretty mind-blowing achievements.

If you combine that to the possible impact in AI and medical learnings on how things like degenerescence, you can imagine why it ends up feeling far more ambitious than the Manhattan project.

fMRI I suppose. As far as I know, even if you have all neuron mapping of human brain, you could not achieve basic intelligence as brain constantly alter with these connections and their strengths. Even if you know all the connections, neuron firing types and representation of information over the network would create a big question for you.

Yea if you think about it short term memory is necessary for the movement of consciousness from state to state. Otherwise it'd be like flipping a toaster on.

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