I Am My Connectome - by Sebastian Seung
"Your individual genomics is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your genes control your looks, but also your personality and the diseases you might get someday. Are we more than our genes? Seung proposes the hypothesis that “I am my connectome.” (rhymes with connect-home)
Your connectome is the 1 billion neurons times the 10,000 dentrite connections; it’s your neural map. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have theorized that maybe what makes you… you, your memories, are stored in the connections between these neurons. It is possible that your personality and your intellect is also encoded there between your neurons. Seung recommends a book titled Guys are waffles and Girls are Spaghetti. He says this book changed his life.
One neuron touches many others through their entangled synapses. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons through these branches, dentrites. The 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote of his dread of the infinite. His feeling of insignificance in contemplating the vastness of outer space. Someday we will have the technology to map a human connectome, but we do not have it currently.
Seung’s work is just to find partial connectomes, tiny chunks in the brains of mice and in the human brain. As you grow during childhood and mature with age your personality changes slowly; likewise, every connectome changes over time.· Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches and lose old ones. Synapses can be created as well as eliminated; synapses can grow larger or smaller.
What causes these changes? To some extent they are programmed by your genes, but that is NOT the whole story.· There are chemical signals that travel along the branches (dentrites) and chemical signals that jump across (neurotransmitters) from neuron to neuron. These signals are called neural activity. There is a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and our mental activity. There is also a lot of evidence that this neural activity can cause your connections to change. If you put these two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. So how could we ever hope to map even one human brain when it is constantly changing?
The connectome of every human is unique. It is where nature meets nurture, even in identical twins. It might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome. The stream bed is a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing; it is like the water in a stream. It never sits still. The connection of the brains neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. So the connectome is like the bed of the stream. The streambed guides the flow of the water, but over long periods of time, the water also shapes the bed of the stream. (Imagine the Grand Canyon.) Neural activity can change the connectome in the same way that water can change the direction of the riverbed. Neuroscientists believe that neural activity is the basis for human thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. So we might speak of the “stream of consciousness”. Neural activity is the water and the connectome is its streambed.
If we someday had the technology to test the hypothesis that “I am my connectome”, how would we test it? He proposes a direct test. Let us attempt to read out the memories from connectomes. For example, playing a particular piano piece is stored as a chain of synaptic connections in your brain. The sequence of neural activation is like a chain of dominoes falling. So one way to test the theory would be to look for such chains inside the connectome. Where is the piano piece chain?
The branches of neurons are like the wiring system of the brain. Can anyone guess, what is the total length of wires in your brain? Seung estimates millions of miles, all packed in your skull.There is therefore huge potential for mis-wiring of your brain. Are autistic brains wired differently? It is plausible, but at present, we can’t see the brains wiring clearly enough to know if that is true or not.The tecnnology that allows us to read a connectome might also allow us to see an example of the mis-wiring he proposes. Sometimes, the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication.
If you believe that “I am my connectome”, then death is the destruction of my connectome. He uses cryonics as an example. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is, “Has that damage erased the connectome?” " ~ Sebastian Seung
Your connectome is the 1 billion neurons times the 10,000 dentrite connections; it’s your neural map. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have theorized that maybe what makes you… you, your memories, are stored in the connections between these neurons. It is possible that your personality and your intellect is also encoded there between your neurons. Seung recommends a book titled Guys are waffles and Girls are Spaghetti. He says this book changed his life.
One neuron touches many others through their entangled synapses. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons through these branches, dentrites. The 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote of his dread of the infinite. His feeling of insignificance in contemplating the vastness of outer space. Someday we will have the technology to map a human connectome, but we do not have it currently.
Seung’s work is just to find partial connectomes, tiny chunks in the brains of mice and in the human brain. As you grow during childhood and mature with age your personality changes slowly; likewise, every connectome changes over time.· Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches and lose old ones. Synapses can be created as well as eliminated; synapses can grow larger or smaller.
What causes these changes? To some extent they are programmed by your genes, but that is NOT the whole story.· There are chemical signals that travel along the branches (dentrites) and chemical signals that jump across (neurotransmitters) from neuron to neuron. These signals are called neural activity. There is a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and our mental activity. There is also a lot of evidence that this neural activity can cause your connections to change. If you put these two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. So how could we ever hope to map even one human brain when it is constantly changing?
The connectome of every human is unique. It is where nature meets nurture, even in identical twins. It might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome. The stream bed is a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing; it is like the water in a stream. It never sits still. The connection of the brains neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. So the connectome is like the bed of the stream. The streambed guides the flow of the water, but over long periods of time, the water also shapes the bed of the stream. (Imagine the Grand Canyon.) Neural activity can change the connectome in the same way that water can change the direction of the riverbed. Neuroscientists believe that neural activity is the basis for human thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. So we might speak of the “stream of consciousness”. Neural activity is the water and the connectome is its streambed.
If we someday had the technology to test the hypothesis that “I am my connectome”, how would we test it? He proposes a direct test. Let us attempt to read out the memories from connectomes. For example, playing a particular piano piece is stored as a chain of synaptic connections in your brain. The sequence of neural activation is like a chain of dominoes falling. So one way to test the theory would be to look for such chains inside the connectome. Where is the piano piece chain?
The branches of neurons are like the wiring system of the brain. Can anyone guess, what is the total length of wires in your brain? Seung estimates millions of miles, all packed in your skull.There is therefore huge potential for mis-wiring of your brain. Are autistic brains wired differently? It is plausible, but at present, we can’t see the brains wiring clearly enough to know if that is true or not.The tecnnology that allows us to read a connectome might also allow us to see an example of the mis-wiring he proposes. Sometimes, the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication.
If you believe that “I am my connectome”, then death is the destruction of my connectome. He uses cryonics as an example. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is, “Has that damage erased the connectome?” " ~ Sebastian Seung