*A fly has been uploaded. That's the takeaway I got after reading an article in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature. Apparently Sebastian Seung, a leader of the project, had a similar thought because he is quoted as saying: *
*“Mind uploading has been science fiction, but now mind uploading — for a fly, at least — is becoming mainstream science.”* *They put the brain of an adult fly in a bath of liquid plastic which soon hardened into a solid block. Then they sliced the entire brain into 7,050 super thin slices and took 21 million high resolution pictures of it. Then they wrote a computer program that could look at all those pictures and trace which neuron was connected to which; from that they were able to conclude that the fly brain had 139,255 neurons and 50 million connections. Pretty impressive considering that previously the best neuronal map was that of a worm that only had 385 neurons, but that's not even the best part. They used the information about how those 139,255 neurons were wired up to make a simulated fly brain on a computer, and they obtained typical fly behavior! Sebastian Seung said:* *"We show that activation of sugar-sensing or water-sensing gustatory neurons in the computational model accurately predicts neurons that respond to tastes and are required for feeding initiation. In addition, using the model to activate neurons in the feeding region of the Drosophila brain predicts those that elicit motor neuron firing. Our results demonstrate that modelling brain circuits using only synapse-level connectivity and predicted neurotransmitter identity generates experimentally testable hypotheses and can describe complete sensorimotor transformations."* *The researchers say their next target is uploading a mouse brain which has about 1000 times more neurons than a fly brain. * *A Drosophila computational brain model reveals sensorimotor processing* <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07763-9.pdf> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> vo3 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0cq_b1%3DxapUvBN7DUtaCQELWAvNmMAL9k16w1HZ2qK%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com.
