i thk it’s actually a human brain donated to SCIENCE
i frgt tho
mine doesn’t look like that. mine is pretty and smooth :3
*head pats
LLMs need tens of litres of water and MWhs of electricity to mimic even a fraction of this thing’s power
David Attenborough voice
While definitely impressive, this synaptic network represents only about one thousandth of a percent of the connections necessary to articulate a typical racial slur.
Nice, nice. Now let’s see Trump’s…
Edit - nevermind I found it
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s brain
It’s really cool. I have some photos of rat pyramidal cells stained with fast blue fluorescent dye. But, not on my phone. I’ll see if I can find them, if I remember.
I thought these were pikmin.
In a way, they could be. At least partially…
I swear I saw this exact same image sometime last month when I was bored and looking into axon arborizations lol
As someone who also likes to research scientific topics when I’m bored, how tf did you go down that rabbit hole?
I’ve been interested in the organization of neurons for a while now ever since I started trying to build my own spiking neural nets. I really want to know how the axons of neocortical neurons branch and if their behavior correlates with their laminar position or gene expression or some sort of diffusion based path following etc.
Much of the widespread data on the 6 layers of the neocortex and what connections go where seems to conflict with more modern understandings but it’s not like the modern models agree with each other super well either. It also seems like glial cells, which are typically thought to just be support cells, might play a more active and significant role in learning than expected.
Anyway point is that I decided to focus on pyramidal neurons and the behavior of their axons because pyramidal neurons are very densely packed in the neocortex and seem to correlate with more complex brain functions. Since most of the resources I can find for describing the laminar structures seem to be vague or contradictory, I decided to specifically focus on research that actually mapped out the arbors so I could draw my own conclusions.
Unfortunately images like the one OP posted are a chaotic mess and axons are typically much much thinner that dendrites so basically everything you see in that image are somas and dendritic arbors.
Yeah, neuroscience is in it’s infancy. Just because we’ve indexed the major players does not mean we understand the game.
Probably did! AFAIK this is the first and, so far, only high definition image of brain tissue at this magnification.
Beautiful!
