cajal

it’s almost like you intentionally missed the commenters point. i can’t wait til you idiot mindless cockroach ai bros stop dictating our financial futures with such stupid bullshit and just crawl back under your rocks.

Lets put it this way: prior to optogenetics, you had absolutely no way to answer questions like: "What happens during this behavior if we block dopamine at the exact moment we think dopamine is important for this behavior?" without trying our best to put a tiny electrode in the exact spot where we think dopamine neurons are found in the brain (on the micron scale), and pray that your stimulation exactly only hits dopamine neurons locally and nothing else (a technical impossibility).

now replace dopamine with any cell type you can think of in the brain, and you can even be more clever and do genetic tricks like "only this type of cell in this part of the brain that only receive input from this other part of the brain, but not others"

it really truly unlocked the entire era of neuroscience we are in, with the focus on circuits.

I predict the next likely era after circuits is networks, and the cool thing about opto is the scalability and the way we can precisely control and shape light to ultimately control networks.

good bot

I think its hard to measure the impact directly, but I'd say it has an enormous indirect effect on neuroscience that is bigger than anything yet I think.

You have to imagine, before opto, EVERYTHING in neuroscience was either genetic or observational, nothing really good with manipulating circuit function directly except for the only real intervention we had - ablation of an entire region without any specificity, especially with regards to passing axons.

Now, I literally expect any neuro paper that even touches behavior or circuits to have some sort of validation with opto, or it's harder for me to believe.

Maybe there's a bit of an over reliance on it in my above comment, but if you have a better causal tool to suggest, be my guest.

This isn't something you need AI for! there's tons of methods papers out there.

Here's an overview from Karl himself: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6814250/

And here's a step by step example protocol: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3490315/