The mission of Obama’s BRAIN Initiative in 2013 was to map the human brain. Twelve year later scientists have mapped 200,000 cells and 523 million synapses of mouse brain, smaller than a grain of sand. That’s all! After billions of dollars and countless man hours, note that they are not one inch closer to figuring out how the mind works. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Scientists have created the most detailed wiring diagram of a mammalian brain to date, mapping every cell and synapse in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s visual cortex. Using cutting-edge microscopy, AI, and 3D reconstruction, researchers captured more than 200,000 cells and over 500 million connections.
The work revealed surprising principles of brain organization, including new inhibitory cell behaviors and network-wide coordination. This achievement provides a foundational tool for understanding brain function, intelligence, and neurological disorders.
n 1979, famed molecular biologist, Francis Crick, stated that it would be “[impossible] to create an exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing.”
But during the last seven years, a global team of more than 150 neuroscientists and researchers has brought that closer to reality.
The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) Project has built the most detailed wiring diagram of a mammalian brain to date.
Today, scientists published the scientific findings from this massive data resource in a collection of ten studies in the Nature family of journals.
The wiring diagram and its data, freely available through the MICrONS Explorer, are 1.6 petabytes in size (equivalent to 22 years of non-stop HD video), and offer never-before-seen insight into brain function and organization of the visual system.
“The MICrONS advances published in this special issue of Nature are a watershed moment for neuroscience, comparable to the Human Genome Project in their transformative potential,” said David A. Markowitz, Ph.D., former IARPA program manager who coordinated this work.
“IARPA’s moonshot investment in the MICrONS program has shattered previous technological limitations, creating the first platform to study the relationship between neural structure and function at scales necessary to understand intelligence. This achievement validates our focused research approach and sets the stage for future scaling to the whole brain level.”
Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine began by using specialized microscopes to record the brain activity from a one cubic millimeter portion of a mouse’s visual cortex as the animal watched various movies and YouTube clips.
Afterwards, Allen Institute researchers took that same cubic millimeter of the brain and sliced it into more than 25,000 layers, each 1/400th the width of a human hair, and used an array of electron microscopes to take high-resolution pictures of each slice.
Read More: World’s Most Detailed Brain Map Built From A Grain Of Brain Tissue
