
High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals - prostoalex
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200319161523.htm
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p1esk
_3,000 times per second. That 's fast enough to trace electrical signals
flowing through brain circuits._

It's incredible how much slower brain signals are than what we are used to
dealing with in modern electronics. To debug a CPU in my laptop I'd need a
scope with multi-GHz sampling rates.

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trhway
Power consumption grows with the square of frequency. Brain working frequency
is just like 200Hz. 100T of synapses (or sizeable share of it) at that
frequency puts us into hundreds tera-ops/second of calculation power - all at
just 20watt of electrical power. To get evolutionary smarter though we
possibly would have to devote bigger share of our body 100watt energy budget
or find a way to produce more energy.

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dntbnmpls
> 100T of synapses (or sizeable share of it) at that frequency puts us into
> hundreds tera-ops/second of calculation power

Considering the top supercomputers can do petaflops, in terms of pure
computation, humans are now permanently surpassed. And in a generation or so,
our smartphones will be able to do petaflops.

It makes you wonder, if computers can now process faster, store more data,
have greater bandwith, etc, why is it still "behind" the human brain? Perhaps
we are missing some aspect of the human brain that makes it special?

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arcticbull
> Perhaps we are missing some aspect of the human brain that makes it special?

It's an analog computer not a digital one. The computational power of a 100T
transistor analog computer would be truly staggering -- orders of magnitude
more powerful than a 100T transistor digital computer.

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ykevinator
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhkK6jURljs](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhkK6jURljs)

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jcims
Needs some explanatory voiceover. Reminds me of slow motion lightning strikes
strikes after the leader connects.

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wjn0
So cool. In my opinion, so many of the open problems in biology can be
approached from the direction of specificity - from specificity in measurement
to specificity in targeting interventions. For example, tools like this for
elucidating cognition; alternatively, cancer (identifying and targeting
problematic cells).

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stilley2
Full article
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/543058v2](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/543058v2)

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ngold
>Abstract

>Understanding information processing in the brain requires us to monitor
neural activity in vivo at high spatiotemporal resolution. Using an ultrafast
two-photon fluorescence microscope (2PFM) empowered by all-optical laser
scanning, we imaged neural activity in vivo at up to 3,000 frames per second
and submicron spatial resolution. This ultrafast imaging method enabled
monitoring of both supra- and sub-threshold electrical activity down to 345 μm
below the brain surface in head fixed awake mice.>

