
To Unlock the Brain’s Mysteries, Purée It - spchampion2
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/magazine/to-unlock-the-brains-mysteries-puree-it.html
======
melling
Suzana Herculano-Houzel has a book:

[https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/24/86-billion-
neuro...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/24/86-billion-neurons-
herculano-houzel/)

And a TED talk:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so...](https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain)

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monitron
That TED talk took an unexpected left turn in the last third which made an
interesting subject ten times as fascinating. Thanks so much for sharing it.

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nonbel
To be honest I expected something way overhyped but her research looks really
good. They take a bunch of relatively simple physical measurements and come up
with a mathematical model that can explain the relationship between them. They
even make physical models of the process:

> _" Our model incorporates the known mechanics and organization of elongating
> axonal fibers (26, 27), as described in the supplementary materials. It
> predicts that from a purely physical perspective, A_G, A_E, and T are
> related by the power law T^1/2 x A_G = k x A_E^5/4\. (The exponent 5/4 is
> the only value for which the constant k is adimensional.)_

[... to supplements ...]

 _To test our model, we made paper balls of sheets of A4 office paper of
different surface areas and thickness by dividing sheets in half in a
geometric series, and stacking different numbers of sheets before crumpling
them. Once each crumpled paper ball relaxed, its diameter was measured along
the three principal orthogonal axes and used to calculate the exposed surface
area of the equivalent ellipsoid. The folding index for each paper ball was
calculated as the ratio between the total surface area of the unfolded paper
and the equivalent surface area of the crumpled paper ball. "_

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6243/74.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6243/74.abstract)

As should be expected from useful science, their new way of looking at things
make the world seem _less_ complex. All too often bio/etc seems to move in the
opposite direction:

> _" The finding that cortical folding scales universally across clades,
> species, individuals, and parts of the same cortex implies that the single
> mechanism based on the physics of minimization of effective free energy of a
> growing surface subject to inhomogeneous bulk stresses applies across
> cortical development and evolution. This is in stark contrast to previous
> conclusions that different mechanisms regulated folding at different levels
> (7); such conclusions may reflect the traditional emphasis on the
> relationship between folding degree and brain volume (1, 8), which is indeed
> diverse across orders, across species, and across individuals of a same
> species (6, 8)."_

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ridgeguy
Really enjoyed this. I got my doctorate in neurophys at a time when the 10
glia/1 neuron in the human brain was accepted dogma, but with little
experimental support. The numerous glia were viewed as little more than
passive electrical insulation around neural axons.

Great to see somebody with a curious mind, a blender, a microscope and
nuclear-specific stains give us a much richer, more complex description and
light a new pathway for further work. Brava!

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qwerty_asdf

      For example, there’s no truth to the idea that 
      the brain is half android and half artist, with 
      a left hemisphere dedicated to logic and analytical 
      thinking and a right hemisphere for intuition and 
      creativity.
    

But! Each hemisphere does tend to sequester different specialties, as is
evidenced by stroke victims, no?

~~~
QML
Yes, I believe you are referencing Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasia — which may
occur after a stroke depending on which hemisphere was affected. But different
specialties in the brain does not enforce the idea that the left part is
logical and right part is creative.

~~~
qwerty_asdf
This kind of speaks to a premise discussed later on in the article regarding
the manner in which the gist of interesting trivia tends to drift as time
passes, the longer trivia is in play and the greater currency it gains among
laymen and non-experts.

Starting with the words:

    
    
      In a decades-long game of telephone [...]
    

The article points to an effect in the field of neuroscience that is not
unlike The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-
ge...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-
amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you)

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mannykannot
The author segues, apparently unselfconsciously, from a critique of unverified
notions that became accepted as if established fact, to uncritically accepting
a number of speculative extrapolations from these results. Those speculations
are interesting, well-founded and plausible, but not yet verified.

The fact that an important discovery was recently made by puréeing brains
indicates how incomplete our knowledge of them is.

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bramen
Pretty amazing to think that our position at the top of the food chain is as
tenuous as a change in diet. I hope no one ever starts cooking for dolphins.

~~~
Tharkun
I wonder how many generations of "cooking (for) dolphins" you'd need in order
for a drastic brain evolution to occur. Probably not enough to provide them
with cooked meals, you'd probably also have to progressively increase the
mental difficulty of obtaining the food.

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QML
The most fascinating part of the article was the tidbit about how fire was a
potential factor in the differentiation of humans and other primates. If the
theory holds true, then society perhaps has a greater impact on our evolution
than previously thought — as the use of fire is not something in our genes but
taught to us by others.

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solarkraft
I may be over looking some complexity here, but to me the least obvious part
in the process is the coloring. The rest just makes sense. If you want a total
average, mix everything together.

~~~
tritium
The following passage:

    
    
      To distinguish between neurons and glia, Herculano-
      Houzel injected the vials with a chemical dye that 
      would make all nuclei fluoresce blue under ultraviolet 
      light, and then with another dye to make the nuclei of 
      neurons glow red. 
    

You mean that part? It’s about differentiating support infrastructure from the
actual cellular operators responsible for cognitive brain function.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglia)

    
    
      VS.
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron)

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eecc
This thing about taking a misquote and enshrining it with Truth attributes is
a surprisingly common occurrence.

An apropos interesting read — in the context of software — would be:
[https://leanpub.com/leprechauns](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns)

Pretty close in spirit to this article

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StavrosK
Summary: She liquefies the brains to measure the numbers of nuclei, thus
accurately extrapolating the numbers of each type of cell in the brain, which
was hard to do with previous methods due to the differnet concentrations of
types of cells in the brain.

