I am curious what you think about optical techniques for connectome tracing. Personally, I really like the idea especially as optical microscopy will allow for lots of stains to be used and will hopefully make inferring electrical properties from dead cells easier. So far though, there doesn’t seem to be a large effort of connectome tracing from expansion microscopy (although a lot of research into the various microscopes and robots to automate everything) and even less on getting cellular properties post mortem. If you have thoughts I would like to hear, if you have research you think is relevant that would be great too.
On the contrary! There’s a lot of work going into expansion microscopy connectome tracing! Both in academia and commercially. I think it’s very promising.
Wow this is great, I am once again incredibly frustrated by my seeming inability to find relevant research without asking people already in the know. If you can think of anything else that would be interesting, please let me know. If there is a single site anywhere that has links and lists of relevant research that would be great. Even OpenWorm and CarbonCopies seem a little scattered but this might be a reading comprehension issue on my part.
I’ve met some of the team working on this project. They seem competent and motivated and optimistic they will succeed: https://e11.bio/blog/roadmap
We must also consider the possibility that cellular-level information may not be sufficient to capture a person’s psychological structure. We might need molecular-level data. Even if information about the synaptic structure of the connectome is sufficient, molecular data could aid in the deduction, reconstruction, and inference of memories by providing greater precision about brain structures. A destructive molecular scan would offer a thousand times more accuracy than a simple microscopic analysis, according to Freitas’s estimates in Cryostasis Revival. Moreover, aldehyde cross-links would need to be corrected, this is essentially a computational task requiring brute-force cryptographic algorithms, as explained by cryonicist Ralph C. Merkle.
A destructive molecular scan of the brain would involve gradually disassembling it, atom by atom, recording the type and position of each atom in external backup software. This could be achieved using positional mechanosynthesis tools, a molecular nanotechnology based on diamondoid materials.
Imagine a giant surgical device mounted on a cart, far larger than a brain. Robotic arms would extend from this device and branch into billions of tiny mechanosynthetic manipulators, molecular fingers, that could manipulate atoms individually.
This method appears safer and more conservative than simply mapping a person’s connectome with fluorescent tracers.
I am curious what you think about optical techniques for connectome tracing. Personally, I really like the idea especially as optical microscopy will allow for lots of stains to be used and will hopefully make inferring electrical properties from dead cells easier. So far though, there doesn’t seem to be a large effort of connectome tracing from expansion microscopy (although a lot of research into the various microscopes and robots to automate everything) and even less on getting cellular properties post mortem. If you have thoughts I would like to hear, if you have research you think is relevant that would be great too.
On the contrary! There’s a lot of work going into expansion microscopy connectome tracing! Both in academia and commercially. I think it’s very promising.
Here’s an example: https://cic.ini.usc.edu/
Wow this is great, I am once again incredibly frustrated by my seeming inability to find relevant research without asking people already in the know. If you can think of anything else that would be interesting, please let me know. If there is a single site anywhere that has links and lists of relevant research that would be great. Even OpenWorm and CarbonCopies seem a little scattered but this might be a reading comprehension issue on my part.
I’ve met some of the team working on this project. They seem competent and motivated and optimistic they will succeed: https://e11.bio/blog/roadmap
We must also consider the possibility that cellular-level information may not be sufficient to capture a person’s psychological structure. We might need molecular-level data. Even if information about the synaptic structure of the connectome is sufficient, molecular data could aid in the deduction, reconstruction, and inference of memories by providing greater precision about brain structures. A destructive molecular scan would offer a thousand times more accuracy than a simple microscopic analysis, according to Freitas’s estimates in Cryostasis Revival. Moreover, aldehyde cross-links would need to be corrected, this is essentially a computational task requiring brute-force cryptographic algorithms, as explained by cryonicist Ralph C. Merkle.
A destructive molecular scan of the brain would involve gradually disassembling it, atom by atom, recording the type and position of each atom in external backup software. This could be achieved using positional mechanosynthesis tools, a molecular nanotechnology based on diamondoid materials.
Imagine a giant surgical device mounted on a cart, far larger than a brain. Robotic arms would extend from this device and branch into billions of tiny mechanosynthetic manipulators, molecular fingers, that could manipulate atoms individually.
This method appears safer and more conservative than simply mapping a person’s connectome with fluorescent tracers.