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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 05 2017, @10:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-let-it-go-to-your-head dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Like the fiber optic cables that connect landline phones, the long branches of brain cells transmit information from one neuron to the next. Unlike phone cables that can only passively carry electrical signals, however, neuronal branches are dotted with synapses—active computational powerhouses that constantly restructure themselves to form our thoughts and memories.

For a neuroscientist eager to study neural circuits and brain function, dendrites—the input cables—are a promising place to start. But with an average width tens or hundreds of times smaller than a human hair, dendrites are hard to observe. At the nanoscale level, synapses are even further beyond reach. Sure, microscopes can help by optically enlarging the tissue, but even the most state-of-the-art equipment is limited in resolution, and CSI-style "zoom and enhance" hardly ever works.

What if, instead of optically blowing up the brain, we could make it physically larger? Sound impossible? I thought so too. But this week, a team of neuroengineers led by Dr. Edward Boyden at MIT achieved just that. By embedding the brain into a gel that swells up when pumped with water, the team blew up mouse brain tissue to roughly 20 times its original size, while preserving the normal structure and connections of neurons and their dendrites. Using this method, aptly dubbed expansion microscopy (ExM), the team reconstructed a tiny piece of the mouse brain in 3D. Normally, dendrites entangle into a jumbled mess, making it hard to tease apart individual synaptic connections with a conventional light microscope.

With ExM, the scientists easily peeked into the dendrites' nooks and crannies, allowing an unprecedented look at little mushroom-shaped protrusions called dendritic spines, where synapses sit. Even wilder, the method also exposed individual protein clusters inside the spines to support normal synapse function and help create neuronal circuits. "ExM can be used to explore neural connectivity in 3D with spatial precision sufficient for resolving individual synaptic connections," the authors say. "If you could reconstruct a complete brain circuit, maybe you could make a computational model of how it generates complex phenomena like decisions and emotions," says Boyden, "you could potentially model the dynamics of the brain."

Brain mapping has been the center of "big neuroscience" for the past few years. Ambitious billion-dollar moonshots such as the BRAIN Initiative and Europe's Blue Brain Project all strive to develop new methods that allow neuroscientists to reconstruct in minute detail the mouse, and ultimately the human, brain. [...] But all brain-charting efforts are limited by microscope resolution. Although physicists have long worked out which parameters are most crucial for overcoming these limits, improving the power and quality of microscopes has been an uphill battle. Boyden's team takes the opposite approach: rather than wrestling with light scattering and physics, why not enlarge the biological specimen?

Not exactly a technique for transcendence though.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 1) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Saturday May 06 2017, @04:29AM

    by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- (3868) on Saturday May 06 2017, @04:29AM (#505316)

    I recall a story with people with enlarged brain/skulls.

    --
    https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling