Anti-connectome-ism

That sure is pretty. 

Do we really stand to learn as much as claimed from deciphering a map of all the brain’s neural connections? Researchers like Sebastian Seung are banking on it. However, not everyone agrees that the “connectome” holds the potential Seung and company claim. 

Aside from the technical difficulty of creating such a map, Mo Costandi notes that even with all the connections traced, the mystery wouldn’t be unraveled:

“… a connectivity map is unlikely to tell use everything we’d like to know about the brain. In the late 1980s, researchers published an almost complete connectome of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, after years of laborious work involving slicing the organism into thousands of ultra-thin sections then examining the sections under the microscope and reconstructing them. This tiny, millimetre-long organism doesn’t even have a brain as such – its entire nervous system contains a grand total of 302 neurons. And yet, the nematode connectome has taught us far less than we thought it would about how this apparently simple nerve net generates the worm’s behaviours.”

In a dynamic organ such as the brain, whose synapses and connections are always changing, adapting and morphing, there’s certainly the question of whether spending so much time and money on connectome science will pay off in the end. We have to get more than just pretty pictures out of this, you know.

I highly recommend reading Mo’s full piece, if just for the bit at the end where he shares a rather scathing anti-connectome email. The term “pukeworthy” is invoked. 

Finally, connectome evangelist Sebastian Seung sat down to debate the idea with neuroscientist Tony Movshon a few months back, moderated by Carl Zimmer and Robert Krulwich. Revisit BrainBrawl 2012.

113 Notes/ Hide

  1. mateenyasir reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
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  3. spesadinfinitumetultra reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  4. suni1shine reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience and added:
    That sure is pretty. Do we really stand to learn as much as claimed from deciphering a map of all the brain’s neural...
  5. iamastrangeloop reblogged this from neuroimages
  6. everydayidreamofyou reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  7. sporklocked reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  8. a-gaping-hindu-prostate reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience and added:
    this is so beautiful
  9. lyneek reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  10. drhfquinzel reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  11. agranular reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  12. neuromatic reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    ^^^
  13. onesteplower reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    Beautiful images, interesting information.
  14. saraahlynne reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  15. nikshim reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  16. evoketheforms reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  17. france-wu reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience and added:
    Why I love science. You can never learn enough.
  18. ashbash13 reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  19. whatshallwedo reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience and added:
    Hey, fuck you! That work was vital for my lab and many others. It may not live up to the shining promise of completely...
  20. the-nuclear-chaos reblogged this from fuckyeahneuroscience
  21. fuckyeahneuroscience reblogged this from neuroimages
  22. apopyasy reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    These are just the same things that we saw with the genome, or really any other “ome”. This type of analysis at best...
  23. diaryofmsneongreen reblogged this from jtotheizzoe

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