Transcriber: Andrea Mussap Reviewer: Denise RQ
I wonder, if I were to ask you to name your favorite innovation
from any point in human history, what would you say?
(Audience) - Media! - Music!
Wow! That's a lot of them. OK, let's have everyone say it together.
So I'm going to count to three and I want you guys to yell out
your favorite innovation, you can name multiple ones if there's a tiebreaker.
So are you guys ready?
OK, one, two, three. Internet!
Alright, that's a lot of innovation, I mean, I heard music,
I think I heard TEDx, microwave, the Internet.
There's so much innovation throughout the course of human history,
and if you think about it,
innovation comes in more forms than just science and technology.
It also comes in the form of culture, and government, philosophy,
and it may seen obvious, but I find it quite amazing
that all of these innovations are made possible
because of the human brain.
But what is the brain?
Well, we know that it's made of about 80 billion neurons,
which is a number that's very hard for me to wrap my mind around,
so I like to put it in the context of cities.
You may recognize this city, it's Amsterdam.
It's a city that I'm quite fond of, and I'm also standing in.
So if every neuron in your brain were a person,
your one brain could populate Amsterdam 100,000 times.
And that's just the neurons, it doesn't even include
any of the other cell types that are in your head.
And these neurons form an extremely complex network,
their cells are joined together through junctions
that we know as synapses.
So one cell will make a synapse with another cell,
and it will communicate with that cell through electrical and chemical impulses.
Now, to wrap your mind around the number of synapses that are in your head
is useful to take an even farther step back.
All the way to the Milky Way.
This is the galaxy that we call home. Earth is in it, our Sun is in it.
Our Sun is one of 300 billion stars in the Milky Way.
There are more synapses in one cubic centimeter of your brain
than there are stars in the entire Milky Way,
And you have about 1,200 cm3 in your brain.
It's pretty complex,
and the reason that we are interested in studying these synapses
and understanding what's going on in the brain
is that in order to understand how our brains make us who we are,
we need to map the networks of cells that are in the brain,
and we need to integrate
functional activity maps into those networks.
I work at Sebastian Seung's Computational Neuroscience Lab at MIT,
and we are specifically focused on reconstructing
synaptic level neural networks in the brain.
So this is one individual synapse.
The way that we actually discover these synapses
is by taking a volume of brain,
and then we image all the way through it.
This allows us to see
the individual neuronal branches that have grown to that volume of brain,
so we can reconstruct the branches in full 3D
and we can fit the branches together into entire cells.
Then we fit those cells together into networks,
and this allows us to understand the cellular level circuitry
that's responsible for information processing in the brain.
Up until a couple years ago,
it took thousands of hours to reconstruct one neuron.
Being a Computational Neuroscience Lab, the amazing team created some software
that brought that reconstruction time down to about 50 hours per cell
which is a huge improvement over thousands,
but you know... 50 hours per cell, 80 billion cells in the brain,
we calculated actually how long that will be,
- because we are MIT, right? -
(Laughter)
so, if you had a team of 100 people,
and they are working 24/7 with today's technology,
it would take about 500,000 years to map one brain.
What? Right?
Humans as Homo sapiens didn't even exist 500,000 years ago,
we were like Homo heidelbergensis,
and we were just figuring out how to make spears.
So no, we had to really think differently, you know,
if we want to answer fundamental questions about the brain,
about how this amazing organ results in an individual, and all these individuals,
and people who can think, and feel, and learn, and laugh, and love
we really had to think outside the box.
So, when looking for inspiration, we turned to these guys:
- angry birds, right? - viral online games.
People spend about three billion hours every week playing online games,
and so we thought: "Hey, what if we could turn our lab software into a game,
and make it so that anyone, anywhere, could play?"
That's exactly what we did.
We created EyeWire, it's a game to map the brain.
It's a relatively new project,
and it can be played by anyone, anywhere, with an internet connection.
And while we haven't even been live for a full year,
so far over 90,000 people from 130 countries have signed up,
and most of them have no neuroscience background.
Our community ranges from high school students to dentists,
sculptors, stock traders, and retired people.
I know you guys are TEDsters, and you like to see ideas,
so, rather than just tell you about the game,
I would like to actually show you.
So, oh, yeah.
So... all right. Oh, my gosh! So this is...
This is EyeWire. I'm going to say...
Oh, they are already chatting.
Hi, guys! from TEDxAmsterdam. (Laughter)
What?
This has actually been running for the whole section, so...
There's - wow, there's a lot of chat.
There's 50 people who are online, actually, right now,
and they are saying hello.
So, yeah... @rinda; Hey @rinda!
@a5hm0r... Ashley is a 21-year-old history major in Belgium,
and she is our top scoring player of all time.
We spend a lot of time interacting with the players in chat.
This thing that you see rotating in the background is actually a neuron,
it's one of many cells that have been constructed by our players.
I can sort of zoom in and show you some of the branches.
Well, I'm on WiFi, so I'm not going to actually play the game
but this will give you guys an incentive to actually sign up
and join to be a part of our lab.
Oh, @nkem. Oh, there's a bot in the game!
If any of the players are watching the livestream, please invoke the bot.
So anyway; we told them that we were going to be at TEDxAmsterdam,
and @nkem is a player actually in Germany,
who's been hacking on the actual game,
he has built features and lots of other additional tools.
In the actual game, players are challenged
to start with one branch of a neuron and extend it to the other side of a cube,
and this is the unit of game play.
And in order to make this fun and keep it fresh,
and make it so that we can, theoretically, eventually, compete with games
like "World of Warcraft" or really "Angry birds,"
we have competitions,
we've done Facebook versus Twitter and Internet Deathmatch,
and the winning team who maps the most amount of neurons
actually gets to name an individual cell.
Yeah, so we have a neuron named Zoidberg,
we have some other ones.
I don't know what's "für die," oh, 'for science', it's in German.
OK, I don't have a whole lot of time
so I'm going to actually switch back to the rest of my presentation
and invite you guys to join EyeWire, of course,
and continue to interact with our players who I think are very awesome.
If we could go back to the other presentation,
I could tell you a little bit more about EyeWire in the meantime, if you like.
OK, here we go.
EyeWire is actually the first of what will be many games
that will open up the opportunity to take a front-row seat
and make new discoveries about the brain to anyone with an internet connection.
These are some of the neurons that our players have discovered.
It's amazing, if you think about when we live in history,
I mean, we're in the midst of an unprecedented call for collaboration,
from European brain projects to the US brain initiative
and China's vast investment in biological and computer sciences.
And in order to achieve the revolutions that we need in neuroscience,
in order to really understand how we are, who we are,
we needed an influx of statisticians, mathematicians.
We need designers, and we need hackers to come into the field of neuroscience,
and really disrupt the way we are approaching science.
And we need young people who have a curiosity about the brain
to pursue fields in neuroscience.
I think it is an extraordinary time
and that people in 200, 500, 1,000 years,
future humans will look back on today's generation
and they will say: "Those ones, those people were the ones
who really laid the foundation for our understanding of the human brain."
Thank you.
(Applause)