zlacker

>>geox+(OP)
The interactive visualization is pretty great. Try zooming in on the slices and then scrolling up or down through the layers. Also try zooming in on the 3D model. Notice how hovering over any part of a neuron highlights all parts of that neuron:

http://h01-dot-neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs://h01-rele...

>>teuobk+c4
My god. That is stunning.

To think that’s one single millimeter of our brain and look at all those connections.

Now I understand why crows can be so smart walnut sized brain be damned.

What an amazing thing brains are.

Possibly the most complex things in the universe.

Is it complex enough to understand itself though? Is that logically even possible?

>>jamiek+R6
Crow/parrot brains are tiny but in terms of neuron count they are twice as dense as primate brains (including ours): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

If someone did this experiment with a crow brain I imagine it would look “twice as complex” (whatever that might mean). 250 million years of evolution separates mammals from birds.

>>nickle+q8
This might be a dumb question, because I doubt the distances between neurons makes a meaningful distance… But could a small brain, dense with neurons like a crow, possibly lead to a difference in things like response to stimuli or “compute” speed so to speak?

>>steve_+Pn
Not a dumb question at all; one of the hard constraints of cou design is signal propagation time. Even going at 1/3 the speed of light, when you only have on the order of a billionth of a second (clock frequencies in the GHz), a signal can’t get very far.

I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains, but signals propagate much slower and a walnut / crow brain is much larger than a cpu die.

>>philsn+mk3
> I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains

Brain waves (partially). They aren't exactly like a cpu clock, but they do coordinate activity of cells in space and time.

There are different frequencies that are involved in different types of activity. Lower frequencies synchronize across larger areas (can be entire brain) and higher frequencies across smaller local areas.

There is coupling between different types of waves (i.e. slow wave phase coupled to fast waves amplitude) and some researchers (Miller) thinks the slow wave is managing memory access and the fast wave is managing cognition/computation (utilizing the retrieved memory).