Connectionists: The Atoms of Neural Computation: A reply to Gary Marcus

[Terry Sejnowski]

The debate between lumpers and splitters on cortical areas will not be settled
until we have the right tools to probe them anatomically and functionally.

We don't even know how many types of neurons there are in the cortex.
Estimates range from 100 to 1000.

One of the goals of the BRAIN Initiative is to find out how many
there are and how they vary between different parts of the cortex:

http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/2025/index.htm

An important source of variability between neurons is differential patterns 
of gene methylation, which is uniquely different in neurons compared 
with other cell types in the body:

Lister, R. Mukamel, et al.  Global epigenomic reconfiguration 
during mammalian brain development, Science, 341, 629, 2013

http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/08/27/charting-the-chemical-choreography-of-brain-development/#more-1983

http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Global%20epigenomic%20reconfiguration%20during%20mammalian%20brain%20development%202013-4331.pdf

We now have optical techniques to record from 1000 cortical neurons 
simultaneously and that will increase by a factor of 100-1000x 
over the next decade.

This will create a big data problem for neuroscience that readers of
this list could help solve:

Sejnowski, T. J. Churchland, P.S. Movshon, J.A. 
Putting big data to good use in neuroscience, 
Nature Neuroscience, 17, 1440-1441, 2014

http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Putting%20big%20data%20to%20good%20use%20in%20neuroscience%202014-4397.pdf

Terry

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