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JoachimSchipper comments on Neuroimaging as alternative/supplement to cryonics? - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Wei_Dai 12 May 2012 11:26PM

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Comment author: JoachimSchipper 16 May 2012 11:12:23AM 0 points [-]

What you actually need is the number of neurons in the brain (10^11), squared

But the vast majority of neuron-pairs is not connected at all, which suggests storing a list of connections instead of the full table of pairs which you propose. If every neuron can be specified in 1KB (location, all connections), we're talking ~100 TB, about $10.000 in hard disks or less in e.g. tape media.

Of course, actually getting all this data is expensive, and you'd probably want a higher level of data security than "write it to a consumer hard drive and store that in a basement".

Comment author: Dolores1984 16 May 2012 09:24:55PM *  1 point [-]

1 KB seems very optimistic. Uniquely identifying each neuron would require the log of the number of neurons in the brain, or 36 bits. Figuring five thousand connections per neuron, that's 36 * 5000 to store which synapse goes where, and (64 + 36) * 5000 to store which synapse goes where, plus the signal intensity and metadata. In short, it'd actually be more like 500 KB per neuron, or 50,000 TB.

Granted that's before compression, but still.