The rate of glucose consumption by the neocortex is reduced by over 80% during anesthesia (Sibson et al. 1998), which disables the synapses (Richards 2002) that are inundated by glial tissue (Engl and Attwell 2015). Synapses provide brains with their computational power (Hebb 1949). Disconnected (pig) neurons on life support have no ability to transfer information (e.g., Sestan 2018) and some might argue that such cells have been reduced to having a computation power below that of a single-celled organism, the amoeba (Saigusa et al. 2008), since they have been taken out of their ‘social’ environment for the expected programming between individual members. Giving ‘organizational’ life to multicellular organisms is not trivial and requires that each cell be subjected to some biological constraints (Albert et al. 2002) in exchange for the energy efficiency obtained per cell, which scales as the 3/4th power of an organism’s body mass (DeLong et al. 2010; Wells 2007), a process that has been shaped by 500 million years of evolution. We are a long way from dumping a bunch of disconnected neurons into a dish and then expecting them to self-organize into a superorganism as envisaged by Sestan (2018). Nevertheless, only by taking science and evolution seriously will we be able to engineer the creation of a superorganism, one of the aims of Geoffery Hinton and associates (Hinton and Nowlan 1987; Krizhevsky, Hinton et al. 2012).
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