
Trying to understand how the brain is computing the mind - jonbaer
http://edge.org/conversation/ed_boyden-how-the-brain-is-computing-the-mind
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sundarurfriend
Interesting read. Neither an interview nor an article, it reads more like a
stream of consciousness content centered around neuroscience tech.

The core idea (for those screaming tl;dr) is based on the initial quote "[t]he
history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get
the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding."
Ed Boyden feels that the tools part has been largely left undeveloped in
neuroscience, and his group has apparently been working on the problem for the
past decade or so.

One such new technology/tool that I found most interesting was:

> Our group had been developing a way of taking brain circuits and tumors and
> other complex tissues and physically expanding them to make them bigger.
> What we do to make the brain or a tumor bigger is we take a piece of brain
> tissue and we chemically synthesize throughout the cells, in-between the
> molecules, around the molecules, in that piece of brain, a web of a polymer
> that’s very similar to the stuff in baby diapers. And then, when we add
> water, the polymer swells and pushes all the molecules apart, so it becomes
> big enough that you can see it even using cheap optics.

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mfn
Optogenetics is incredibly exciting. Trying to understand the brain without
such a technique seems analogous to trying to debug a complex program without
being able to vary its inputs and instrument it to dump state information.

Boyden mentions that optimistically, this technique could be perfected within
just 5 years and potentially yield enough information to allow us to construct
computational models of (small) neural circuits. Would be interesting to see
how quickly this progresses now that it seems that we have the tools.

