Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome

In the brain, neurons are connected into a complex network. Sebastian Seung and his lab at MIT are inventing technologies for identifying and describing the connectome, the totality of connections between the brain's neurons -- think of it as the wiring diagram of the brain. We possess our entire genome at birth, but things like memories are not "stored" in the genome; they are acquired through life and accumulated in the brain. Seung's hypothesis is that "we are our connectome," that the connections among neurons is where memories and experiences get stored. Seung and his collaborators, including Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute and Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University, are working on a plan to thin-slice a brain (probably starting with a mouse brain) and trace, from slice to slice, each neural pathway, exposing the wiring diagram of the brain and creating a powerful new way to visualize the workings of the mind. They're not the first to attempt something like this -- Sydney Brenner won a Nobel for mapping all the 7,000 connections in the nervous system of a tiny worm, C. elegans. But that took his team a dozen years, and the worm only had 302 nerve cells. One of Seung's breakthroughs is in using advanced imagining and AI to handle the crushing amount of data that a mouse brain will yield and turn it into richly visual maps that show the passageways of thought and sensation.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says

By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian? American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum. "These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it." Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-religion-survey-20100928,0,3225238.story

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서시(序詩)

죽는 날까지 하늘을 우르러 한점 부끄럼이 없기를, 잎새에 이는 바람에도 나는 괴로워했다. 별을 노래하는 마음으로 모든 죽어가는것을 사랑해야지 그리고 나한테 주어진 길을 걸어가야겠다. 오늘밤에도 별이 바람에 스치운다. Yun Dong-ju (December 30, 1917 - February 16, 1945) was a Korean poet active during the period of Japanese rule. He was known for his writing of lyric poetry as well as resistance poetry against Japanese.