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Neuroscience: News and Discussions.

Full History - 2012 - 06 - 05 - ID#umwa1
6
What animals have had their brains mapped out to the greatest detail? (self.neuroscience)
submitted 11y ago by samueljackson1105
I'm a computer science major taking a few neuroscience classes and was wondering if any animals with very nervous systems (goldfish?) have had their brains mapped to great detail. If anyone can answer this, it would be nice to know to what amount of detail and where I can find the publication/information that describes the neuroanatomy the best. I think that the mind is completely grounded in the body and that it is entirely possible to understand it through the study of neuroanatomy. It would be amazing to model (within our computational means) such a nervous system and try to have it function like a real animal in order to illustrate my point of biological determinism!
vincethemighty 7 points
Unfortunately only organisms with very, very simple nervous systems have been mapped. Things like the hydra (which is Cnidria, something like a stationary jellyfish) and everybody's favorite worm the c. Elegans have been mapped out, but both of these are so simple they're more like nervous 'nets' than systems.

Besides that we don't even have a reliable enough model of a single nerve cell, since nervous cells are extremely diverse in size, morphology, electrical properties and spiking patterns.

There are some crazy scientists at MIT (lead by Sebastian Seung) trying to automate the process of mapping an entire mouse brain by using robotics to slice and image processing algorithms to reconstruct the connectivity between cells. I am skeptical of this kind of project because it seems way out of the realm of reasonable numbers to compute; mammalian cortical neurons make around 10,000 connections to other neurons, and 1 cubic mm contains maybe 100,000 of such cells.
itsallforscience 2 points
It would be much more productive to do some of your own research regarding what has already been done toward this goal. It may feel like you are the first computer science major to be interested in neuroscience, but I assure you there are thousands of computer literate theoreticians and experimentalists hard at work. The brain is much more complicated than you imagine, even if you consider nervous systems that lack a defined brain.
[deleted] 1 points
[deleted]
NeverGonnaGiveUUp 1 points
Aplysia Californica is a very well understood animal. Although the entire map of the nervous system hasn't been made, scientists know the most about its basic memory encoding neurons, and the parts of the nervous system that are mapped are manipulated in experiments. The mapped regions are theoretically enough for you to perform your biological determinism experiment. It has ~20,000 neurons in its nervous system and is one of the animals we use in our lab. Scientists even know which specific neurons are used for recalling/learning certain memories such as its retracting reflex. That is as close to fully mapped and understood that I know of. The zebrafish is a close/distant second depending on your definition of "greatest detail."

Hope that helps.

Edit: Defined "very well understood animal."
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