Transcriber: Mateo Upegui Reviewer: Jorge Arturo Gomez Retamoza
If we want to advance neuroscience,
we need to map the brain.
Our lab at MIT has been working on this for a while now,
but it's going very slowly.
It takes one of our researchers
upwards of 50 hours to map one cell.
Now, that is one neuron,
and there are over 80 billion
in just one human brain.
Each cell exhibits exquisite structure,
kind of as you see here.
It's quite a painstaking process.
Our researchers have to manually trace the inside,
branch by branch
and then stack all these little bitty pieces together,
until we're able to reconstruct one entire cell.
And by mapping neurons -- there is a video on the slide --
so anyway, by mapping neurons --
Oh, let me just start that over, because it needs to be recorded --
By mapping neurons,
we are able to understand how they process information.
And this will help us unlock the keys
to things like, perception, the true neuroscience of learning.
And things like,
how the brain miss-wires in mental disorders.
But there simply are not enough neuroscientists in the world
to make this happen.
So, we've opened it up.
We've made this available to anyone,
and now lots of people are doing it.
60,000 people from one hundred countries
are helping us discover how the brain works.
Sebastian Seung's Computational Neuroscience Lab
at MIT has built EyeWire, a game to map the brain.
Our new community is only five months old,
has discovered numerous neural networks,
and complete cells, that were previously unknown.
Together, they're changing our fundamental understanding
of the science of visual processing.
And our top-scoring daily player
is a sixteen-yer-old from Bulgaria.
Like... what!? It's amazing!
And over time, their actions in EyeWire
are training advanced machine-learning algorithms
that will help automate the reconstruction
of 3D objects from image data.
And this is a revolution to the Scientific Method.
And we have fun with this science.
Actually, we host team-based competitions
where we pitch social networks against each other.
Think Reddit versus Facebook in a battle to the death.
No, a battle to discover missing branches of neurons.
But the team that wins the competition, gets to name the cell they discover.
You know, that's leaving a legacy, right!?
You know, it's fun and it's important.
Right now, people are discovering
missing branches of these cells,
but I think, as we move forward,
we'll figure out ways that we can strategically
involve these brains from around the world
and people will be able to play a more fundamental role
in determining how research actually moves forward.
You know, it's important.
And these gamers are helping our lab do work.
And it's fun!
And it's not just our lab.
Labs around the world are kind of
breaking out of academic isolation,
and engaging the general public
in unprecedented approaches
to the scientific method.
We live in an amazing time.
You know, you all have smartphones,
we're all connected to the web.
We have exponential computing power
and clouds full of data.
But, this presents an interesting problem for researchers,
because they're limited in number,
and they only have so many hours.
So we're barely able to skim the surface
of a massive amount of data.
But "citizen science" games are changing that.
Foldit's gamers solve bio-medical mysteries.
NASA's citizen scientists,
we call them "stargazers"
because they gaze into the heavens, right?
And they discover new celestial bodies.
And citizen science suites, like Zooniverse,
provide platforms for researchers
to develop and deploy crowdsourced games
to massive multi-player online communities.
And this, is only the beginning.
It's estimated that people spend
three billion hours, every week,
playing online games.
That's 342 thousand years, every week. What?
That number is expected to grow to 21 billion by 2020.
So, imagine if researchers could harness
a significant portion of this time,
and put these people's brainpower to use,
solving scientific challenges --
If we could get ten minutes a day,
from ten million people,
that would come to 66 years worth of full-time work every week.
But it's not work,
it's playing a game to advance the very forefront of science!
You know, a part of making science popular
is bringing it back, you know,
making it a part of people's daily lives.
Citizen science does that.
Think that by playing even a small role
in something so big as mapping the brain
really fosters a new kind of community around science.
It builds those authentic connections.
So, what's next?
Citizen Scientists, you,
hold the power to revolutionize scientific progress
in ways that we can only begin to imagine.
So, help us out!
Join the community.
It is awesome.
Thank you! (Applause)