Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science1 and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.
The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”
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It’s actually mostly Harvard scientists, I think they partnered with Google on the computer vision aspect, but that lab from Harvard has been working on this project for many years.
certainly not for evil reasons
The researchers have released sample images. Not being a neuroscientist, I don’t know how useful these images are in research. But to a layperson like me I think they’re great for showing the complexity of the brain.
not lovin that this is being done by “Google scientists”.
I’m guessing the Google scientists were mainly for the computer vision aspect. That lab at Harvard has been working on this project for many years.
Me neither. But at least it’s very interesting research. And it throws a lot of cold water on the “brain uploading is coming soon!” techbro crowd’s delusions.
