[HN Gopher] High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals ___________________________________________________________________ High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals Author : prostoalex Score : 35 points Date : 2020-03-28 17:12 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com) | p1esk wrote: | _3,000 times per second. That 's fast enough to trace electrical | signals flowing through brain circuits._ | | It's incredible how much slower brain signals are than what we | are used to dealing with in modern electronics. To debug a CPU in | my laptop I'd need a scope with multi-GHz sampling rates. | trhway wrote: | Power consumption grows with the square of frequency. Brain | working frequency is just like 200Hz. 100T of synapses (or | sizeable share of it) at that frequency puts us into hundreds | tera-ops/second of calculation power - all at just 20watt of | electrical power. To get evolutionary smarter though we | possibly would have to devote bigger share of our body 100watt | energy budget or find a way to produce more energy. | leshokunin wrote: | That's really insightful, thanks. Somehow made me think of | AMD's "let's add more cores" strategy, but it makes sense! | p1esk wrote: | Can't compare those teraops directly: my laptop's CPU is a | lot more precise than my brain. | ykevinator wrote: | https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhkK6jURljs | jcims wrote: | Needs some explanatory voiceover. Reminds me of slow motion | lightning strikes strikes after the leader connects. | wjn0 wrote: | So cool. In my opinion, so many of the open problems in biology | can be approached from the direction of specificity - from | specificity in measurement to specificity in targeting | interventions. For example, tools like this for elucidating | cognition; alternatively, cancer (identifying and targeting | problematic cells). | stilley2 wrote: | Full article https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/543058v2 | ngold wrote: | >Abstract | | >Understanding information processing in the brain requires us | to monitor neural activity in vivo at high spatiotemporal | resolution. Using an ultrafast two-photon fluorescence | microscope (2PFM) empowered by all-optical laser scanning, we | imaged neural activity in vivo at up to 3,000 frames per second | and submicron spatial resolution. This ultrafast imaging method | enabled monitoring of both supra- and sub-threshold electrical | activity down to 345 mm below the brain surface in head fixed | awake mice.> ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-03-29 23:00 UTC)