Friday, September 20, 2013

Eyewire

It's amazing what our own brain doesn't notice about itself. How am I typing this, and why have I decided to eat a sandwich consisting of a particular cheese on particular bread? It's questions like these that Neuroscientists are trying to find an answer for. However, many of these brain scientists are finding themselves at a wall on what to do next, as their are so many nerves in the brain that its hard to map out what controls what. But, what if the entire world were to help map it? Sebastian Seung thought about this and came up with a game in which you fill in cross sections of nerve tissue to map out a 3D image of the nerve you are looking at. It's called Eyewire, and it's available online for free. Your job is to look at a cube made up of tiny cross sections of nerve tissue in the retina, specifically the J-cell and its connections, and find the colored holes. These holes represent one line of connected nerves that the computer has colored in for you. The problem is, sometimes the computer has trouble indicating where a hole continues, and where a hole ends. That's where you come in. By sifting through the multiple layers of cross sections, you must color in the areas that the computer missed, and possibly delete the areas the computer colored wrong. Once all the holes in the cube are filled in, you can submit it and check how well you matched other players who mapped that particular cube. My question to you is this: What are some reasons that not all neuroscientists agree with this form of mapping out the brain?


2 comments:

  1. I don't know why neuroscientists would have a problem with crowdsourcing a problem that one need very little specific expertise to perform, and then marginalizing over the solution space proposed by the crowd. What's the alternative?

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  2. This is very interesting. What I wonder is even with help of millions of people can we ever actually map the brain? Even if we could does that mean that everyones neurons work in the exact same way?

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