Version 2.0 of the system, demonstrated last year, increases the sensor count by about an order of magnitude over that of the initial version produced just four years earlier. Successes in these preliminary studies give us confidence that Neuropixels is shifting neuroscience into a higher gear that will deliver faster insights into a wide range of normal behaviors and potentially enable better treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy and How do physiological needs produce motivational drives, such as thirst and hunger? What regulates behaviors essential to survival? How does our neural system map the position of an individual within a physical environment? Early experiments already underway-including some in humans-have helped explore age-old questions about the brain. Neuropixels because it functions like an imaging device, but one that records electrical rather than photonic fields. Envisioning and shepherding the technological aspects of this ambitious project has been one of the highlights of my career.
MID 2010 MAC PRO MEMORY SOFTWARE
But more than a decade of R&D by a global, multidisciplinary team of engineers, neuroscientists, and software designers has at last met the challenge, producing a remarkable new tool that is now being put to use in hundreds of labs around the globe.Ĭhief scientist at Imec, a leading independent nanoelectronics R&D institute, in Belgium, I saw the opportunity to extend advanced semiconductor technology to serve broad new swaths of biomedicine and brain science. The probe would need to be durable enough to stay put and record reliably for weeks or even months as the brain guides the body through complex behaviors.įor an electrical engineer, those requirements add up to a very tall order. That would mean building a digital probe long enough to reach any part of the thinking organ, but slim enough not to destroy fragile tissues on its way in. Harris, a senior scientist at HHMI, told me that “we need to record every spike from every neuron” in a localized neural circuit within a freely moving animal. Our goal: to listen in on the electrical conversations taking place among thousands of neurons at once in any given thimbleful of brain tissue. Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to explore how we might use advanced microelectronics to invent a new sensor. In 2010, I met with leading neuroscientists at the
MID 2010 MAC PRO MEMORY PLUS
The brain is essentially an electrical organ, and that fact plus its gelatinous consistency pose a hard technological problem. Each invention of a new way to measure brain activity-including scalp electrodes, MRIs, and microchips pressed into the surface of the cortex-has unlocked major advances in our understanding of the most complex, and most human, of all our organs. People often think of technology as applied science, but the scientific study of brains is essentially applied sensor technology. So it’s easy to understand why many of the operational details of humans’ brains (and even the brains of mice and much simpler organisms) remain so mysterious, even to neuroscientists. That’s like asking a microelectronics engineer to reverse engineer the architecture, microcode, and operating system running on a state-of-the-art processor without the use of a digital logic probe, which would be a virtually impossible task.
Now imagine trying to figure out how this wonder of bioelectronics works without a way to observe its microcircuitry in action. It is a breathtaking achievement of biological evolution.
MID 2010 MAC PRO MEMORY PORTABLE
Imagine a portable computer built from a network of 86 billion switches, capable of general intelligence sophisticated enough to build a spacefaring civilization-but weighing just 1.2 to 1.3 kilograms, consuming just 20 watts of power, and jiggling like Jell-O as it moves.