WASHINGTON (Kashmir English): In a landmark development, neuroscientists have produced the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammalian brain to date using tissue from a part of a mouse’s cerebral cortex involved in vision.
Insight into human brain
The achievement is being hailed as a possible insight into how the human brain works.
The neuroscientists worked out the cerebral architecture in a tissue sample the size of a grain of sand bearing more than 200,000 cells including roughly 84,000 nerve cells, called neurons, and about 524 million connections between these neurons at junctions called synapses, according to the research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Simply speaking, the scientists collected data that covers about 5.4 kilometers of neuronal wiring in a part of the brain that processes visual information from the eyes.
“The millions of synapses and hundreds of thousands of cells come in such a diversity of shapes and sizes, and contain a massive complexity. Looking at their complexity gives, at least us, a sense of awe about the sheer complexity of our own minds,” said neuroscientist Forrest Collman of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, one of the lead scientists in the research.
