Hi! I’m Sudarsh, and I’m a Sophomore on leave from a physics degree at Caltech with the hopes of building magical models of brains. You can contact me at kvsudarsh786 at gmail dot com, sudarshk216 on signal, or sudarshk_ on x.
I think that we’re currently living in one of the most exciting times in history, and I think there’s so much potential for good in the world, and so many wonderful facets to explore. Even though so many things have been discovered in the past, there seems like there’s an explosion of resources in the recent few decades and this feels reflected in the abundance that I feel today.
I’m currently working on trying to emulate the brain of a few small model organisms, starting off with the Zebrafish. I’m taking at least a year off from school to work on this. I also worked in a wet lab over the summer doing ultrasound imaging, though I didn’t have many fantastic results from this.
The brain is really remarkable in so many ways to me - the substrate it’s built on is, for lack of a better term, kind of shitty. Neurons are probably not that complex, and are really slow. Even if all the computation inside a neuron was essential, it’s at the very least limited by diffusion / motor proteins / other biological processes. Computers seem like they should be so much better than the brain is, and yet the brain is about the current frontier of computation. There’s some special sauce here, probably.
For what it’s worth, this could very much just be scale. There may be up to a quintillion neurons in the human brain - it’s probably $\approx 10^3 - 10^4$ ish times larger than the largest neural networks right now, but this only tells half the story for me. I would expect the amount of intellectual “work” to be somewhat proportional to the amount of physics “work” done by the brain, and this is around 30 watts, which is remarkably low! Here are some other brain questions I have: