Lili 🏳️‍⚧️ @neurolili@qoto.org

@Excuse_haver brains.slime would be fun! Whoever decides domain extensions should definitely consider .slime and .sludge in the next standard

@albertcardona @aeble
alas synap.se is taken as well

@aeble That would be a great name, but it's already taken sadly... The ones above are still available

@freemo Oh wow, I didn't realize that the cost for storing and searching past posts would be so high! It's good to know this in advance.

Also that's a great point about listening to people but not pleasing everyone. I'll keep that in mind as well!

@freemo Thank you for the reply! The second point about longer limit is definitely from me being spoiled here and seeing how much nicer the discussion can be.

I'm curious about two things:
1) If you can share, how much does it cost to run qoto.org per month? How big of a machine do you use?
It helps a lot to see cost breakdown from other servers for planning.
2) Do you have advice on setting up a welcoming culture?

@ichoran @albertcardona Ah yes that's a good point! Yes, perhaps I was overzealous in comparing GCaMP to BOLD. It's more like doing widefield imaging with GCaMP6s.. Even in flies it could be interesting to do this, although there it would be more powerful complemented with genetics and anatomy. Sophie Aimon did some work along these lines, although this whole subfield is still early.

@csdashm @albertcardona Ah, I wanted to add also that I totally agree with you about knowing much more details about the structure of fly brain and nerve cord as well as mouse cortex, yet still grasping at a nice explanation of how it all works.

I have found the integration of connectomics with functional imaging in central complex so satisfying to watch unfold. Certainly you couldn't do this with fMRI! The genetic targeting, spatial resolution of imaging, and connectomics are just not there at this time.

Still in other places my impression is that the strangeness and complexity of the connectome is truly humbling. IMO, we need better constraints from functional studies and from behavior. Then again, my research is in quantifying behavior so I'm probably biased there haha.

@csdashm @albertcardona
To expand on the "cognitive fingerprint" comment, cognitive neuroscientists often treat the pattern of neural activations evoked by a stimulus or mental concept as a "fingerprint" for that concept.

For instance, I remember going to a talk by a social scientist where she showed similarities in the neural activity between two tasks: reading about companies interacting or reading about people interacting. In contrast, reading about objects interacting produced different neural responses. To see whether corporations are seen as people or objects, the specific areas activated are not important, but the similarity of the patterns is. The activation pattern is treated as a fingerprint: the grooves in the finger matter only in that they consistently identify the finger's owner.

Treating the neural activity as a fingerprint and inferring mental concepts is a big part of cognitive neuroscience. However, this can frustrate biologists who care about the specifics of the neural computations. What's more, in systems neuroscience, my impression is that behaviorism rules and it frowns upon inferences about the psychology of non-human animals. Thus the gap is even bigger!