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
The electrical signals in brain are chemical reactions, not conductivity like a metal wire. They are slow! Synaptic junctions are a huge number of indirect chemical cascades, not a direct electrical connection, they are even slower! So brain morphology and connectome has a massive impact on what can be computed. Human twitch responses are done by cerebellum, not cerebrum. It's faster, but you can't do philosophy with the cerebellum, only learn to ride a bike etc. This is the brain doing the best it for the circumstances.

>>tlarkw+iJ3
>The electrical signals in brain are chemical reactions, not conductivity like a metal wire.

Nerve signals are both chemical reactions and electrical impulses like metal wire. Electrical impulses are sent along the fat layer by ions Potassium , Calcium, Sodium etc.

Twitch responses are actually done in spinal cord. The signals are short circuited all along the spine and return back to muscle without touching the brain ever.