Connectome

No road, no trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth.

All the trees of this dark forest grew from 100 billion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is destined to die.

The tree fits in a container less than one foot in diameter. And there are seven billion on this earth.

Each of us is a caretaker of one, the forest that lives inside your skull.

The trees are those special cells called neurons. The mission of neuroscience is to explore their enchanted branches — to tame the jungle of the mind.

This is a partial glimpse of what I see as pure poetry in the Introduction chapter from Sebastian Seung in his book, Connectome. He writes that a connectome is the totality of connections between the neurons in a nervous system. It’s not one connection it’s all of them. Sebastian’s premise, minds differ because connectomes differ.

He writes that the brain remains an enigma.

The author also touches the subject of AI writing that some philosophers believe to simulate consciousness on a computer is impossible. Arguing that no matter how accurate we simulate water with a machine it’s still not water.