Scientists Are Finally Close to Digitally Recreating Worm Brains

For nearly three decades, scientists have repeatedly failed to create a functioning digital simulation of the simple brain of a microscopic worm with just 300 neurons. The scientific name of the worm is C. elegans, but you might better know it as a nematode.

Thanks to the can-do attitudes and ceaseless positivity of people who are trying to recreate the brains of very tiny worms, researchers are finally on the verge of cracking this nut, thanks to cutting-edge technology, as detailed by Asterisk Mag.

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If you’re wondering why they even want to do this in the first place, it’s because they’re starting off small so they can eventually scale up to simulating the brains of more complex organisms, like humans.

Modern microscopes use sheets of laser light to rapidly capture clearer images of neural activity without damaging tissue. Fluorescent proteins let us see neurons firing in real time. Those two things combined let us look at a nematode brain in real time. Pair all of this with modern machine learning that can collect an enormous amount of data about the connections between neurons, and you’ve got a recipe for simulating the nematode brain.

Simply mapping it isn’t enough, though. We also need to understand how the neurons behave; how they bounce off each other and work in tandem to create behavior. That’s the truly complicated part. Electron microscopes can give us detailed images, but they can’t truly capture the brain’s electrical activity.

And even if we do figure out how to simulate a worm’s brain, scaling it up to more complex creatures is going to be a massive undertaking. There are so many variables to take into account once you start scaling up that the task seems impossible, at least for now. All advancements begin with a small step, and simulating a nematode brain could be that step.

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