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Comment by cubetime | Hacker News Reader

If you're just saying that this specific project is a poor use of resources at the moment, then yeah, agreed. I don't really feel justified in suggesting that any particular level of abstraction will have so little to tell us that it'll never be a good use of resources.

>That [simulating small subsystems of a brain] is what's already happening all over the world right now, in thousands of independently scoped simulations and experiments.

Woah! Links? The searches I can come up with aren't turning up anything besides that simulation of a rat cortical column and the various attempts at nematode uploading.

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> that it'll never be a good use of resources.

Never is a long time ;)

> Woah! Links?

Any university with a neuroscience department does this. Go to your local university's website and browse what they're doing in that area: more likely than not you'll find something interesting. Basic research on neurons has become very common, and computer-based modeling is a fundamental part of it. The perception problem here is that, say, modeling the signaling behavior of locust neurons seems like a very inconsequential piece of the puzzle - but in reality it's what we need to do to figure this stuff out.

The fundamental problem in neuroscience research is not a lack of complexity, for now we need to move away from complexity in order to observe the behavior of basic building blocks. It may seem embarrassing how we're still at that stage, but it's where we stand.

This is not my subfield of neuroscience, but here are some people I know who do spiking neural network simulation to understand how brains work:

http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bdoiron/

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~larry/

http://www.cns.nyu.edu/wanglab/

http://alleninstitute.org/our-research/modeling-analysis-the... (modeling group)

http://www.nada.kth.se/~ala/

There are also some companies that are led by people with academic experience doing spiking neural network simulation and seem to be trying to commercialize it:

http://www.braincorporation.com/

http://www.evolvedmachines.com/

Ah, yes, "a single neuron" is indeed a small subsystem of a brain, and it is indeed common nowadays.

Here's where I would start: https://www.google.com/search?q=computational+modeling+cogni...

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