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Sebastian Seung: Connectome

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Commonwealth Club of California

Commonwealth Club

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Partner:: Commonwealth Club
Location:: SF Club Office
San Francisco, CA
Event Date:: 02.13.12
Speakers:: Kishore Hari,; Sebastian Seung
Tags:: mind; neuroscience; neurology; neurons; evolutionary neuroscience; brain; genes

Summary: MIT professor Sebastian Seung has found what he calls the nexus of nature and nurture: the "Connectome", or the network of connections between neurons in the human brain. He will take you inside his ambitious quest to model the Connectome, which, if successful, would uncover the basis of personality, intelligence, memory and disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.McGill University Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences Daniel Levitin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Connectome is "the best lay book on brain science I've ever read.""

Bio

Kishore Hari

Kishore Hari joined SEP in November 2009, bringing an interest in engaging public audiences in science discussion. In 2007, he founded Down to a Science, a San Francisco based science cafe, to create social dialogues fueled by scientific research. Building on its success, Kishore started BayAreaScience.org, a web portal to all of the various science institutions and events throughout the Bay Area. Kishore has a B.S. in chemistry from the University of California-Berkeley. In 2002, he co-founded Superior Adsorbents Inc., an environmental services company specializing in heavy metal remediation from air, soil, and water.

Sebastian Seung

Dr. Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Assistant Neurobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. Dr. Seung has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow, and a McKnight Scholar.

Chapters

: Watch Full Program

01 hr 05 min 24 sec

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01.: Introduction

01 min 28 sec

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02.: The Word 'Connectome'

02 min 20 sec

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03.: What Is a Connectome?

02 min 37 sec

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04.: Connectionism: Why We Care About Neural Connections

04 min 48 sec

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05.: How Do We Find Connectomes?

03 min 25 sec

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06.: Neuroimaging Technology

06 min 03 sec

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07.: What Do We Need?

05 min 31 sec

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08.: Cryonics and Mind Uploading

03 min 04 sec

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09.: "Seeing Is Believing" Reading Excerpt

02 min 34 sec

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10.: Q1: Complexity of Studying Connectomes?

02 min 20 sec

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11.: Q2: "I Am My Connectome"?

03 min 37 sec

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12.: Q3: What Information Are We Looking For?

02 min 09 sec

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13.: Q4: Social Computing?

02 min 57 sec

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14.: Q5: Can You Recreate a Memory?

02 min 36 sec

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15.: Q6: Gender Differences?

01 min 23 sec

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16.: Q7: How Aging Affects Connectomes?

02 min 14 sec

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17.: Q8: Where Will We Be in Ten Years?

02 min 24 sec

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18.: Q9: Diseases Expecting to Impact?

01 min 18 sec

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19.: Q10: Advantages of a Bottom Up Analysis?

02 min 44 sec

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20.: Q11: Hope for Immortality?

01 min 45 sec

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21.: Q12: Preserving Connectomes After Death?

03 min 36 sec

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22.: "Introduction" Reading Excerpt

02 min 32 sec

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23.: Q13: Where Does Emotion Fit in?

01 min 57 sec

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: Watch Full Program

01 hr 05 min 24 sec

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Want to Upload Your Brain? Science Fiction Comes to Life

02 min 53 sec

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Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT Sebastian Seung discusses how the study of "connectomes", a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, can help turn science fiction into reality. Seung proposes that through the study of the connectome we can test whether ideas such as freezing ourselves or uploading our brains on to computers are even possible.
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01 hr 05 min 24 sec

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Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are

Encyclopædia Britannica Article

neurology: Medical specialty concerned with nervous system function and disorders. Clinical neurology began in the mid-19th century, when mapping of the functional areas of the brain first began and understanding of the causes of conditions such as epilepsy improved. The development of electroencephalography in the 1920s aided in the diagnosis of neurological disease, as did the development of computerized axial tomography in the 1970s and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in the 1980s. In addition to dealing with physical disorders (e.g., tumours, trauma), neurology is unique among medical specialties in its intersection with psychiatry. Greater understanding of the brain chemistry of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression has led to a wide array of effective drugs that nevertheless work best in conjunction with psychotherapy. Side effects of drug or surgical therapy can be serious, and many nervous system disorders have no effective treatment.; neurology on britannica.com