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<!--EndFragment--><div><div>On Nov 3, 2014, at 5:13 PM, Terry Sejnowski wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>The debate between lumpers and splitters on cortical areas will not be settled<br>until we have the right tools to probe them anatomically and functionally.<br><br>We don't even know how many types of neurons there are in the cortex.<br>Estimates range from 100 to 1000.<br><br>One of the goals of the BRAIN Initiative is to find out how many<br>there are and how they vary between different parts of the cortex:<br><br><a href="http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/2025/index.htm">http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/2025/index.htm</a><br><br>An important source of variability between neurons is differential patterns <br>of gene methylation, which is uniquely different in neurons compared <br>with other cell types in the body:<br><br>Lister, R. Mukamel, et al. Global epigenomic reconfiguration <br>during mammalian brain development, Science, 341, 629, 2013<br><br>http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/08/27/charting-the-chemical-choreography-of-brain-development/#more-1983<br><br>http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Global%20epigenomic%20reconfiguration%20during%20mammalian%20brain%20development%202013-4331.pdf<br><br>We now have optical techniques to record from 1000 cortical neurons <br>simultaneously and that will increase by a factor of 100-1000x <br>over the next decade.<br><br>This will create a big data problem for neuroscience that readers of<br>this list could help solve:<br><br>Sejnowski, T. J. Churchland, P.S. Movshon, J.A. <br>Putting big data to good use in neuroscience, <br>Nature Neuroscience, 17, 1440-1441, 2014<br><br>http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Putting%20big%20data%20to%20good%20use%20in%20neuroscience%202014-4397.pdf<br><br>Terry<br><br>-----<br></div></blockquote></div><br><div>
<div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div><div><div>Stephen Grossberg</div><div>Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems</div><div>Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering</div><div><div>Director, Center for Adaptive Systems <a href="http://www.cns.bu.edu/about/cas.html">http://www.cns.bu.edu/about/cas.html</a></div></div><div><a href="http://cns.bu.edu/~steve">http://cns.bu.edu/~steve</a></div><div><a href="mailto:steve@bu.edu">steve@bu.edu</a></div></div></div></div><div><br></div></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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