
A new way to capture the brain’s electrical symphony - laurex
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06694-6
======
Udik
I'm tempted to attach electrodes to this very article in the hope of
extracting some information from the noise.

Someone should write a generator of articles like this:

"One day, in <random_year>, <intro_character> was [swimming in the
Caribbeans|strolling in the streets of Manhattan|hunting bears in northern
Alaska|having a tooth removed|relaxing in an Amsterdam coffeeshop] when
[received an unexpected phone call| noticed something relevant to her
research|experienced a vision of the Truth]".

<intro_character> had been working for [months|years|decades] on [visualising
neurons activity|teaching salmons to count|developing fluorescent
cabbages|cloning ancient etruscans]. Now, there was some hope...

Since <other_random_year> scientists had been studying the issue, but progress
was slow, because [only a few researchers in the field| salmons brain is very
small| Italian bioethical laws].

In the meantime, [5000 km away| on the other side of the globe| in the
opposite building| in Poughkeepsie] <another_random_character> had been...
Etc.

~~~
codeulike
yeah I really dislike this style, and you see it everywhere. For some reason
this sort of pop science article always needs to start with a person doing
something somewhere picturesque

~~~
posterboy
Just today I remembered the well known fact that story telling facilitates
memorization.

The other day I wondered whether story telling was the highest form of art,
prompted by HN comments on the reception of art. Later I wondered how much the
sequential nature of histories facilitated the development of language, and
how the need to express parallel developments using a sequential medium
created syntax, recursion and dialogue.

Here, the author isn't in the place of the protagonist, neither is the reader.
But a story needs a hero. Especially in topics such as this it helps to remind
that these could be familiar people. Naturally, in science the heroic result
should be most important. In that regard this is click bait. It paints a stark
contrast. It does not present a new way, just another stepping stone to high
fidelity measurements. It's way over the top for entertainment purposes.

The style doesn't prohibit skim reading though. If jumping to the highly
abstract abstract would be too terse ... maybe the story you are trying to
compose by reading nothing in particular is highly parallel, but lacking
interaction.

------
aperrien
Is it possible to use the information from the florescent flashes to build a
truth table for individual neurons over time?

~~~
hprotagonist
not really. Neurons fire in the absense of any stimulus at some base noise
floor rate, so there’s always a little bit of uncertainty. They don’t really
act like logic units, close up.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Why would this be an argument against getting data of an individual neuron? We
would obviously just have some filtering applied to it to attempt to remove
the noise, in the simplest case even just a noise gate adjusted to that
default rate. It would still provide information from individual neurons.

~~~
hprotagonist
you can absolutely get data from an individual neuron. What data you get is
not a truth table.

