Forrest Coleman
Appearances
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
That stimulus was like a series of YouTube clips, like clips of Mad Max and The Matrix and so on and so forth.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
This study is the largest study of the mammalian brain that's able to map individual connections between individual neurons. And that's really hard to do because the brain is kind of like a giant ball of spaghetti. Its wires are all mixed up together, and it is difficult to trace them all and find the points where those wires meet and the connections are made between neurons and the brain.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
And so... We reconstructed all of those individual wires with really incredible precision by taking the kind of metaphorical ball of spaghetti that is the brain and cutting it up into thousands of extremely thin slices and taking many really high resolution images of those slices using an electron microscope.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
over almost 100 million images and then used a combination of computer science and machine learning to put all those images back together again and try to trace those individual wires through the ball of spaghetti to find the places where the cells connected.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
neuroscientists' best idea about how do our brains function is that information flows through these complex networks and is processed through the really complicated, intricate patterns that these neurons are making with one another in the synaptic connections. And so having a map of that is a kind of foundational resource to try to understand how the brain is doing that.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
Yeah, we didn't just map the connections, but before we did that, the animal was actually imaged in a different kind of microscope that made the neurons glow brighter when they were active. And so we were able to record how individual neurons are responding to the visual stimulus that the mouse was given.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
And that stimulus was like a series of YouTube clips, like clips of Mad Max and The Matrix and so on and so forth. And so in that way, we can sort of try to understand each of these individual neurons, what aspect of the movie clip tends to make that neuron active.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
Well, what's remarkable is that mice don't have a favorite clip, but individual neurons do. Individual neurons only respond to a certain visual. And our colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine were able to build a machine learning model that in certain circumstances was able to really highly predict how individual neurons are able to respond to any visual stimulus. So in this
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
In this way, they built a kind of AI twin of the mouse's brain, and then they can show that sort of twin any visual stimulus and predict how the individual neurons were going to respond. And then we are able to use that to analyze the combination of these two things, the wiring diagram and the functional responses.