If you were born at some point after 1976, and grew up in anything but the most unlikely of circumstances, there’s a good chance that an adult of some kind—a parent, a teacher, an aunt—told you that you should stop playing video games because they were really bad for your brain. Forgive these finger-waggers: there was no way, after all, for them to imagine something as groundbreaking as EyeWire, a video game that harnesses the passions of hundreds of thousands of players to achieve no less exalted a task than the mapping of the human brain itself.
Like so many other great inventions, EyeWire, was born of frustration. Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team led by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung grew weary of the time it took to map each of the brain’s cells. Eager to advance this momentous undertaking, they managed to cut down the time it took to map each single cell—a long and complicated process that previously consumed thousands of hours—into a mere two-day stretch.
Ever the scientists, Seung and his crew did some simple math: if the brain had around 80 billion cells, and if each cell took about 50 hours to map, that still meant that a team of 100 researchers, using the most recent computational technology and working every single hour of every day of the week without sleep or break, would still require upwards of 500,000 years to complete the project. Worried that mankind will never fully understand the magnificent processing unit that powers each of us to learn and love and communicate with each other, they looked elsewhere for sources of inspiration.
Almost immediately, they stumbled on video games. Hundreds of millions of people, they knew, spent billions of hours—as many as three billion hours per week, according to some calculations—playing games online. What if one of these games would involve the actual cartography of actual neurons and synapses?
Thus was born EyeWire. The game takes images of retinal cells that connect the eyes and the brain, and challenges gamers to identify their wiring. The faster and more accurate they get, the more they’re rewarded by receiving points and unlocking special powers.
“It’s a fun kind of game because no two cubes look alike,” says Amy Robinson, the project’s executive director. “It’s a challenging puzzle, and as you play it you help discover a never-before-charted area of the brain.”
Gamers agree: to date, more than 200,000 of them have become EyeWire devotees. Which, Robinson notes, is still a far cry from the number of gamers who flock each day to, say, World of Warcraft; still, those who get hooked on EyeWire tend to develop a special connection to the game, seeing it as much more than mere mind-numbing entertainment.
“One player built a bot to answer FAQs,” Robinson says, recalling a helpful bit of user-generated software that immediately identified new players and directed them to helpful resources to aid them in their efforts to better master the game. “He hacked our system in such a wonderful way.”
That’s the kind of dedication you get when your game promotes perhaps the greatest scientific undertaking facing mankind at the moment; remember that next time anyone tells you video games are a waste of time.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen