Tag Archives: Connectome

Whale Song Analysis Crowd-sourcing

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Scientific American is collaborating with marine scientists on a project to crowd-source analysis of whale songs and calls. Having gathered thousands of sound files from many species of whales, scientists now need to classify each call and song to get an understanding of each specie’s repertoire. Once the calls and songs are sorted and classified, scientists can pursue interesting questions like, is a whale’s song repertoire related to its intelligence?

To classify the vocalizations, scientists are asking the public for help. On whale.fm, anyone (no expertise required) can sift through some spectrograms and embedded sound files, and match them to a template. It’s easy, fun and cool. Something that would take one person months or years to do, can now by accomplished much faster by the public in a fun format.

Some previous efforts in scientific crowd-sourcing like FoldIt, a game in which people fold proteins based on simple rules (computers can’t do this), or the search for new galaxies by amateur astronomers from images taken by the Hubble telescope. Perhaps this type of effort could help the Connectome efforts to map out the brain down to each synapse using electron microscopy, where every neurite in a cross-sectional image must be strung to itself in adjacent images. Tracing axons across thousands of EM images could actually make a fun and productive game.

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Here is a nice interview with Jeff Lichtman of Harvard, who is working on a cellular-level map of synaptic connections in the brain (a connectome). The interview raises several questions, like how can we collect thousands of petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of data of the structure of the brain at the level of individual cells? Do we even need so much data? Even though connectomics won’t reveal much about neural dynamics (i.e. how neurons actually transmit or integrate information), it should be a useful tool for further work in theoretical neuroscience. Someone has to do it.

One caller in this interview asks a great question on the hard problem of consciousness: when scientists look at neuronal activity when one is thinking of a childhood pet, where in the universe is that image of the dog? All the scientists see, after all, is electrical activity…

Connectomics is the name. Connections are the game.

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You are unique, just like everyone else.

Connectomics is the study of the structural and functional connections among brain cells; its product is the “connectome,” a detailed map of those connections. The idea is that such information will be monumental in our understanding of the healthy and diseased brain. Sebastian Seung thinks that a complete connectome of the human brain will be one of the great prizes in 21st-century neuroscience.

Efforts to construct brain connectomes are split into two categories: ones that use imaging techniques like MRI, PET, and DT, thus focusing on macroscopic connections or tracts; and those that use electron microscopy to map the tinniest of axons (0.2-20 microns in diameter) and individual synapses. Continue reading →