The New York Times Magazine has a nice profile on theoretical neuroscientist Sebastian Seung this week. I’ve known Sebastian since we were graduate students in Boston in the 1980’s. We were both physicists then and both ended up in biology though through completely different paths. The article focuses on his quest to map all the connections in the brain, which he terms the connectome. Near the end of the article, neuroscientist Eve Marder of Brandeis comments on the endeavor with the pithy remark that “If we want to understand the brain, the connectome is absolutely necessary and completely insufficient.” To which the article ends with
Seung agrees but has never seen that as an argument for abandoning the enterprise. Science progresses when its practitioners find answers — this is the way of glory — but also when they make something that future generations rely on, even if they take it for granted. That, for Seung, would be more than good enough. “Necessary,” he said, “is still a pretty strong word, right?”
Personally, I am not sure if the connectome is necessary or sufficient although I do believe it is a worthy task. However, my hesitation is not because of what was proposed in the article, which is that we exist in a fluid world and the connectome is static. Rather, like Sebastian, I do believe that memories are stored in the connectome and I do believe that “your” connectome does capture much of the essence of “you”. Many years ago, the CPU on my computer died. Our IT person swapped out the CPU and when I turned my computer back on, it was like nothing had happened. This made me realize that everything about the computer that was important to me was stored on the hard drive. The CPU didn’t matter even though every thing a computer did relied on the CPU. I think the connectome is like the hard drive and trying to figure out how the brain works is like trying to reverse engineer the CPU from the hard drive. You can certainly get clues from it such as information is stored in binary form but I’m not sure if it is necessary or sufficient to figure out how a computer works by recreating an entire hard drive. Likewise, someday we may use the connectome to recover lost memories or treat some diseases but we may not need it to understand how a brain works.
