Misc,
To reverse engineer an entire nervous system
(2023)cite arxiv:2308.06578Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, opinion paper.
Abstract
There are many theories of how behavior may be controlled by neurons. Testing
and refining these theories would be greatly facilitated if we could correctly
simulate an entire nervous system so we could replicate the brain dynamics in
response to any stimuli or contexts. Besides, simulating a nervous system is in
itself one of the big dreams in systems neuroscience. However, doing so
requires us to identify how each neuron's output depends on its inputs, a
process we call reverse engineering. Current efforts at this focus on the
mammalian nervous system, but these brains are mind-bogglingly complex,
allowing only recordings of tiny subsystems. Here we argue that the time is
ripe for systems neuroscience to embark on a concerted effort to reverse
engineer a smaller system and that Caenorhabditis elegans is the ideal
candidate system as the established optophysiology techniques can capture and
control each neuron's activity and scale to hundreds of thousands of
experiments. Data across populations and behaviors can be combined because
across individuals the nervous system is largely conserved in form and
function. Modern machine-learning-based modeling should then enable a
simulation of C. elegans' impressive breadth of brain states and behaviors. The
ability to reverse engineer an entire nervous system will benefit the design of
artificial intelligence systems and all of systems neuroscience, enabling
fundamental insights as well as new approaches for investigations of
progressively larger nervous systems.
