Back around 1970 I heard about a researcher who had a couple hundred pipette electrodes, all in parallel and affixed to a square plate, that was pushed into a brain to read a couple hundred extracellular points in the brain. Unfortunately, I don't remember enough about the reference to exhibit it here. I remember hearing about this from William Calvin.
Note that the equipment didn't then exist to record and analyze this many parallel real-time inputs, so researchers had to switch their limited monitoring equipment between electrodes. This would establish the rate of progress at approximately zero, and the time to monitor the entire brain as infinite. Note that none of the past or present approaches to monitoring monitor anything but voltage. There are various ions being bidirectionally moved around to compute far more than can be seen by voltage alone, and these remain beyond our "modern" technology to observe. Further, all present approaches to monitoring KILL some percentage of the neurons that they seek to monitor. To scale, looking at an axon is a lot like monitoring YOU by stabbing you with a telephone pole sized electrode. Axons survive this better than people, but often all you monitor is the last seconds of the death of the neuron. No, for these and other reasons I reject the idea that we are making ANY significant progress in this area. Steve ===================== On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 11:57 AM, tintner michael <[email protected]>wrote: > "Out of a human brain's 100 billion neurons, researchers can presently > monitor only about 200 at a time. This is sort of like trying to predict a > presidential election by polling three people. " > > > http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/world-wide-mind/201101/new-moores-law-neuroscience > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > -- Full employment can be had with the stoke of a pen. Simply institute a six hour workday. That will easily create enough new jobs to bring back full employment. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
