Neuroscientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED

my name is bobby castillo i'm an assistant professor at the university of chicago and a neuroscientist at argonne national labs what the connectome is is it's a kind of a newly made up term for describing a kind of neuroscience research where we try to map the brain at a scale that's never been met before every person here can leave with understanding it at some level [Music] do you know why we're here today because we're talking about science yes we're going to talk about science and we're going to talk about a very specific kind of science

about people who study brains do you know what a brain is what is it things um so what we're going to talk about this is something that people study in the brain called the connect tone do you know that your body is made up of really tiny things called cells um yes okay well there's more cells in your brain like way more cells than than all the stars we can see and so what the connectome is is we'd like to know where every cell in your brain is and how it talks to every other cell

in your brain that was awesome daniel thank you connect tone connect tone to be honest i have no idea that's good that's a great place to start there are cells in your brain those brain cells are connected by wires to each other electricity travels down those wires and communicates from one part of the brain to the other part of the brain and each of those brain cells makes you know a thousand connections something like a hundred trillion connections in one brain in your brain if could i take all of that information and put it inside

a computer would that computer then be you computers they don't have feelings they won't have feelings and i think that's one thing that makes the human race wrong i would say that that map also has your feelings in it because here's why your feelings most neuroscientists think come from your brain anyway and amazingly whether when you feel happy or sad or angry or scared that's just brain cells communicating with each other [Music] so i think today we're going to talk about a connectome do you have you ever heard of that a connect home yeah no

awesome i don't think so it's a map of all the connections between every neuron in your brain uh literally in a human brain something like the map of the one quadrillion connections that 100 billion neurons make with each other is this like a a map where that's like an actual visual representation like using microscopy or just data wow wow i'm understanding more so that it's these these the a mapping of the neuro the circuitry the pathways between neurons that can lead to evidence of patterns in your brain that are common between different people we have

to use electron microscopes and then what we have been developing are ways to slice the brain into really thin slices use an electron microscope to take a picture of each slice and then use computers to put it all back imagine that we could get the map of every connection right and we knew how neurons fired do you think we could put that in a computer that map and then therefore that computer should be able to think just like the brain that we extracted it from well the computer only communicates with itself in binary so it

only has two options it can only ask itself yes or no questions but a human brain has an infinity of directions that it can go neurons are also digital uh meaning a neuron either fires or it doesn't fire so that's either one or a zero and it's the combination of those ones or zeros that actually produce the 10 000 different answers that you say [Music] it's a large scale attempt to understand the wiring map of the brain actually great i think that it's definitely needed understanding the anatomy of the brain is definitely important but it

doesn't necessarily tell us everything about the function so there's some sort of temporal order from neuron to neuron and region to region that we may not be able to pick up this is where it gets really crazy could we simulate that map inside a computer and would that computer then be thinking like that original brain for which we made the map i mean that's not that's not the person i mean having a representation of someone's neural network is just that it's just a representation of their neural network i mean because there's more to the to

you in here than just information passing between neurons i'd like to think so it would be like if you simulated a hurricane imagine we could keep track of every variable of a hurricane wind speed every water molecule etc etc temperature and we put that inside a super fast computer and we simulated it right i don't think anyone would think that the inside of the computer would get wet even though we had simulated the hurricane perfectly that wetness is consciousness is what we are is it ethical to imagine mapping a male brain versus a female brain

to look for differences between those to explain alleged behavioral differences between them every single person is different and so it should be okay to map every single person's brain i mean i understand that there are that it's very sensitive you know what do you think is sensitive mapping an indian brain versus a caucasian brain or politically i think that people may have some issue with mapping out what causes or what makes a difference between different types of people maybe a wiring diagram is not sufficient to understand the brain and it would be crazy to think

that that would be sufficient actually if you limit the connectom to be just the wiring diagram without you know more information about uh myelination or glial cells correct all types of environmental features that surround you know the neurons and axons then then you have an incomplete picture right no doubt sometimes when people get um they worry about connectomics i think what they're actually worrying about is that it's the end of the way that we used to do neuroscience what do you think about memory do you think that there's um ways of resolving what the substrate

of human memory is you know is it just ltp and lcd i'm not sure if you had a connectome of a human brain of an adult human i would be able to read out memories from that you don't think it's just the synaptic weights like an artificial neural network it's trained to do particularly it could absolutely be but without knowing what the weights were before the memory was made what if you had a violinist learn a piece of bach music yes could you find those notes somewhere in their brain yes they didn't know before yes

um you know i'm a musician and i don't think it's possible i think that there are too many you know so much of it is associative to what you already know uh-huh and as a musician how much of it do you think is in your hands versus in your brains uh meaning like you do have connections in your muscles from the nerves that are from your spinal cord uh what if some of the learning is there are you still doing em or yeah i mean we do a lot of x-ray in addition to em and

this is actually i'm not saying it's the only problem but it's the only problem that needs to be solved right away is that the data analysis right in fact i think we calculated that there aren't enough humans ever to map a mouse brain uh uh where will you collect every connection and uh etc so the problem is to get algorithms to to trace to recognize things in brains the way humans uh uh recognize things in brains or map things trace things in brains it's going to cost a lot of money uh to imagine setting the

gold standard for the wiring diagram even once and that's what i'm those are the kinds of ethical concerns that i'm worried about one of the things that we're not doing well as a field is sort of educating and telling people beyond our field the benefits of what we can achieve and i'm impressed that when you talk to people about something that seems kind of crazy and outlandish and perhaps they hadn't been talking about before it doesn't take them long to come to a kind of considered opinion especially children i think it's kind of amazing i

mean i do hope that more people talk about brains and what we use brains for and the ways that we shouldn't use our brains so i think this field has the opportunity to make that more real