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Thursday, August 08, 2013

A Video Game to Map the Brain

Fascinating piece in Wired about the use of game dynamics to map connections in the brain.  Another example of the use of game dynamics, one of several that are aimed at gathering scientific data.

" ... Called EyeWire, the browser-based game asks players to map the connections between retinal neurons by coloring in 3-D slices of the brain. Much like any other game out there, being good at EyeWire earns you points, but the difference is that the data you produce during gameplay doesn’t just get you on a leader board—it’s actually used by scientists to build a better picture of the human brain.

There’s a huge bottleneck in the lab’s research around image analysis.
Created by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT, EyeWire basically gamifies the professional research Seung and his collaborators do on a daily basis. Seung is studying the connectome, the hyper-complex tangle of connections among neurons in the brain. ... " 

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