So much for the better mouse trap David Brin, again: Spectacular. This one experiment proved several things. “Mice have been created whose brains are half human. As a result, the animals are smarter than their siblings.” The altered mice still have mouse neurons – the thinking cells that make up around half of all their brain cells. But practically all the glial cells in their brains, the ones that support the neurons, are human. newscientist/article/dn26639-the-smart-mouse-with-the-halfhuman-brain.html#.VHzY1Ie0b2s Beyond the “uplift” related implications… (contain these buggers carefully!)… it also proves something I have long contended, but which singularity hyper-optimists like Ray Kurzweil denied… that there is more to the computational power of our brains that the mere flashing of neurons. Stuff is going on elsewhere! Perhaps “intracellular computing” in which a myriad non-linear “calculations” take place within aqueous bags, for every sparkle where axon meets dendrite. IF this is true, then we are even more marvelous than we thought, and it will take many more Moore’s Law doublings before a box can begin to emulate a human brain. “Human astrocytes are 10 to 20 times the size of mouse astrocytes and carry 100 times as many tendrils. This means they can coordinate all the neural signals in an area far more adeptly than mouse astrocytes can.” This also provides a mouse analogue in which detailed studies of human cells can take place. One researcher asks: “If you make animals more human-like, where do you stop? Um…. Indeed. I think let’s discuss this.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 02:08:29 +0000
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