MIT’s Sebastian Seung has turned mapping the neurons of the retina into a social game, all in the name of neuroscience.
The retina is one of the most easily dissectible parts of the neurological system, and easy to isolate, but “looks like garbage,” Seung says, speaking at Wired 2012. “You need to look at under the microscope. It’s such a complicated structure that it’s safe to say that it’s more than just a camera; it’s a computer that performs some of the tasks of visual perception”. To figure that how it performs those tasks requires mapping the “tangles of spaghetti” that are the neuron pathways between the cells of the retina, a small part of the overall quest to understand the machine that is the brain.
Many people, Seung says, are uncomfortable with the idea of the brain being a machine that can be understood as just a collection of parts. “Most people I talk with hear you’re a neuroscientist [and] they ask lots of questions. But in the end the conversation comes around to you not being able to explain how the mind works without invoking the soul,” he says. The brain is so complicated, though, that it’s no surprise that people would think that there must be more to it than just key parts.
To know that, though, requires building “a parts list” like the kind you might get with some popular Swedish furniture, says Seung — “but the parts list of the retina has frustrated neuroscientists for decades”. It currently runs to a hundred types of cell and counting.
The type of cell that Seung is particularly interested in is the J cell, which plays a role in detecting motion — but neuroscientists aren’t sure how. That’s why Seung and his colleagues launched Eyewire, a site where any amateur neuroscientist can log on and scroll through 3D scans of retinal neurons. Users mark out the paths the neurons trace from cell to cell, correcting the guesses the computer might have got incorrect. There’s even an international leaderboard for people to compete with each other for points.
Seung says: “Professional scientists can’t do it alone — we need amateur neuroscientists. It’s important because there are questions that we all care about, like, why don’t our brains work properly? Sometimes there are neurological disorders like Parkinson’s where the brain decays and dies, but in other disorders we don’t know what’s going on. Some have speculated that it’s wired differently, but how can you know if it’s wired differently without mapping the wires?”
(Source: wired.co.uk)
