To map neurons, researchers currently use an electron microscope to take pictures — with one image usually containing a small number of neurons. The researchers then study each neuron’s shape and size as well as its thousands of connections with other nearby neurons to learn about its role in behavior or biology.
“We don’t know much about how brains work”, said Ji.
In 2013, MIT organized a competition that called on researchers to develop automated computer algorithms that could speed up image analysis, decode and understand images of brain circuitry. As part of the competition, the algorithms are compared to work that was done by a real team of neuroscientists. If computers can become as accurate as humans, they will be able to do the computations much faster and cheaper than humans, said Ji.
WSU’s research team developed the first computational model that was able to reach a human level of performance in accuracy. (1)
Computers mapping the brain. But not their brain. The brain of their makers. In a way dictated by their… makers. Who – by the way – don’t know much about how the brain works. It would be funny if you read it in the Onion. But no. This is science.
And sure, the point of searching how something works is to find out what we do not know. But the problem is that whatever you try to search for, you only do because you already know that it is there. Science is not about looking into an unknown place and just be startled by what you find there. This kind of acceptance is religion. Science is about searching into an unknown place with a telescope which has been configured and calibrated to look for one specific thing and always within the context of a theory which claims specific things and which makes people think in a certain way. (I would also add always in the context of a specific funding agency as well, but well, that is another story)
There was no way for people researching Euclidian geometry to reach to a conclusion that… Euclidian geometry is wrong. The only way of doing that was to just think outside of Euclidian geometry – something which meant that in the context of Euclidian geometry they were irrational and scientifically wrong.
Wittgenstein has said it a long time ago.
Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples.
Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Sleep tight.
Your brain is being mapped…
