zlacker

After reading through all comments as of 2024/05/11 I (as a professor at some major university) am quite surprised that not one single comment has asked the obvious question (instead of dishing out loads of (partial) "textbook knowledge" about brain functions, the difference between mammals and birds, AI and LLM etc.), which would be: what do all those strange structures and objects do which we know nothing about whatsoever? Have a look:

https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/gallery.html

I count seven.

>>NexusM+(OP)
Neat, thanks.

As a complete outsider who doesn't know what to look for, the dendrite inside soma (dendrite from one cell tunnelling through the soma of another) was the biggest surprise.

>>NexusM+(OP)
I'm in awe at the complexity and unknowability of it all, but I also have to chuckle at the thought that some portion may be vestigial.

I'm particularly fond of the "Egg shaped object with no associated processes". :)

>>dmarbl+4i
me too! :-)

>>NexusM+fi
wrt to the egg - could be excreting chemicals modulating the intracellular medium

>>NexusM+(OP)
It's pretty awesome that all this complexity produces something beautiful like, a smile, or love.

>>dmarbl+4i
Tech debt in our own brains.

>>dmarbl+4i
Maybe it's vestigial. But when I was your age that's what they said about "Junk DNA", which turned out not to be junk.

>>NexusM+(OP)
These data do not have a control group of healthy similar tissue samples, thus are not falsifiable, and are not 100% scientifically valid.

>>dmarbl+4i
Sure, if you think of it as an egg, instead of as a galaxy of electrons and atoms so dense as to have structure big enough for us to give it the label "egg shaped object".

What if it's a "wireless" device?