neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, and LeDoux offered to vouch for Hutton. Hutton had recently shot a music video for a band called the Amygdaloids, a side project of the N.Y.U. He e-mailed Markram a few times but received no response. “Markram was a hero of mine, and I thought, I need to get in on the ground floor of this.” Lehrer’s profile had ended with the usual backside-covering caveats-to be sure, Markram might not succeed, etc.-but Hutton wanted the entire glorious arc. “I was fully awe-inspired,” Hutton told me recently.
In 2009, when Hutton was in his final year of college, Markram delivered a viral TED talk in which he claimed that he could simulate a human brain within ten years. Hutton had encountered Markram’s seminal early work in a class on mammalian cortical circuits, but, as with Lehrer, it was the brain-simulation effort-the attempt to construct the legendary “brain in a vat,” with all of the philosophical issues it entailed-that took hold of his imagination. Hutton was an aspiring filmmaker-his first documentary, “Crude Independence,” which he shot in a North Dakota boomtown between his junior and senior years, premiered at SXSW before he graduated from college. The virtual neurons are more real than reality.”Īt the time, Noah Hutton was studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University. Lehrer wrote, “The model, in other words, has exceeded its own inputs. One of Markram’s scientists told Lehrer that their study of neurons in silico-that is, on a chip-was more propitious than the in-vivo and in-vitro processes used by “actual” experimenters: they enjoyed access to much cleaner data than their error-prone human colleagues did. Such unapologetic self-mythologizing on the part of a subject is difficult for a journalist to resist, and Lehrer was patently captivated by Markram, who had “an aquiline nose and a lustrous mop of dirty blond hair that he likes to run his hands through when contemplating a difficult problem.” Though his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, Lehrer comments, Markram could “pass for a European playboy.” Lehrer was primed to believe Markram, and, when treated to a theatrical visualization of one of the team’s preliminary achievements, of a simulated portion of a mouse brain’s neocortex, he was not disappointed. Of his effort, Lehrer wrote in the sadly long-defunct Seed magazine, “Markram hopes that it represents a whole new kind of neuroscience.” As Markram put it to Lehrer, “You need to look at the history of physics.” He continued, “From Copernicus to Einstein, the big breakthroughs always came from conceptual models.” A by-product of this computational strategy would be a solution to the mystery of consciousness. With the help of supercomputers descended from I.B.M.’s Deep Blue, he planned to construct a full-scale model of the brain from the ground up: each individual neuron would have a digital analogue. If there was to be real progress in understanding what exactly was going on in our heads, a more enterprising approach would be required. Researchers had generated an enormous wealth of fine-grained data, but the marginal returns had begun to diminish. Neuroscience, Markram declaimed to Lehrer, had reached an impasse.
BUDGET CUTS HENRY DANGER CODE
Lehrer’s visit, however, had been occasioned not by Markram’s incremental contributions to the field-it’s not easy to sell a colorful profile on the basis of such publications as “The neural code between neocortical pyramidal neurons depends on neurotransmitter release probability”-but by Markram’s pivot, in the early two-thousands, to brain simulation. Markram’s work in the laboratory, which involved piercing neural membranes with what Lehrer described as an “invisibly sharp glass pipette,” was known for its painstaking precision.
BUDGET CUTS HENRY DANGER SERIES
Markram, a South African, had trained at a series of élite institutions in Israel, the United States, and Germany in the nineties, he published foundational papers on neural connections and synaptic activity. Sick & Wired Brawl in the Hall The Rock Box Dump Danger Games ( Game Shakers crossover) Toon In For Danger Meet Cute Crush Back to the Danger Part 1 Part 2 Budget Cuts Cassie: (laughing) You're tickling my wrists.In 2008, the journalist Jonah Lehrer paid a visit to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, to profile Henry Markram, a world-renowned neuroscientist.
4 Danger Games ( Game Shakers crossover).
0 kommentar(er)
