Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? - Berkeley News (2024)

4ish orders of magnitude’s between fly neuron counts and a human’s. Not to mention mammals tend to have more synapses per neuron than invertebrates.

So I’d say, no humans are not next.

Probably easiest to go to fish next for simplicity, but with the prevalence of mice in neural studies, maybe we’ll skip fish and move right on to mice.

Then to some primate(s), maybe working our way up through several species.

Then humans.

I said it in another thread and I'll say it in this one.

Holy. Shit. The terror. The unknowable terror. Is digital-fly conscious? Have we any way of knowing?

The laptop, was it a ThinkPad?

So you’re telling me those are not just someone’s booty cheeks viewed from the back?

Shiu put his in silico fly brain to the test by simulating the activation of neurons that sense sugar or water. The model predicted that specific neurons would fire to extend the fly’s proboscis and initiate eating — a result he and his colleagues showed is true in real adult flies. When simulating activation of sensory neurons from the fly’s antennae, the model predicted the firing of neurons in the circuit involving grooming with the legs, exactly the behavior a fly exhibits when it gets dirt on its antennae.

That is impressive.

How does this deal with learning?

Getting a sense of the scale:

139,255 neurons and 50 million connections [...] 10 year effort [...] It was assembled from 7,000 thin slices through a female adult fly’s brain, imaged with electron microscopy and annotated by AI to identify neuron types and connections.

Compared to house mouse at 71M and human at 8.6×10^10.

No, probably a slightly more complex animal, like a gecko. Then a bird or rodent. Then a dog, then a chimp, then finally a human.

Maybe they can then give the simulated human brains to the Powers That Be so they can start making smart decisions.