Thanks to the “Matrix” mouse-watching clip, scientists have created the biggest functional map of the brain to date. This is a diagram of the wiring that connects 84,000 neurons when firing a message.
Using a portion of the mouse’s brain for the size of poppy species, researchers have identified those neurons and tracked how they communicate through branch-like fibers through an astounding 500 million junctions called synapses.
The large dataset, published Wednesday by Journal Nature, presents a step towards unraveling the mystery of how our brains work. The data assembled with 3D reconstructions colored to depict various brain circuits is open to scientists around the world for additional research, and is simply interested in voyeurism.
“The project’s leading researchers are: Forest Colman, of the Allen Brain Science Institute in Seattle, said: “You get a sense of how complicated it is. We see the beauty and complexity that can be seen in the small parts of the mouse brain and in the hundreds of millions of connections between these real neurons.”
Forest Colman / Allen Research Institute / AP
How we think, feel, see, talk, move, by neurons or neurons in our brain. How they are activated and send messages to each other. Scientists have long known that these signals migrate from one neuron along a fiber called axons and dendrites. It uses synapses to jump to the next neuron. However, little is known about the network of neurons performing a particular task, or how disruptions in their wiring plays a role. Alzheimer’s disease, autism Or other disorders.
“We can make a thousand hypotheses about how brain cells work, but we can’t test those hypotheses unless we know the most basics. How do you tie them together how those cells connect,” said Clay Reid, a scientist at the Allen Institute, who helped pioneer electron microscopy to study neural relationships.
In the new project, a global team of over 150 researchers mapped neural connections comparing Colman to intertwined fragments of spaghetti wrapped around a part of the mouse brain that causes vision.
First Step: View Sci-Fi Movies, Sports, Animation, Nature Mouse Video Snippets.
The team at Baylor College of Medicine did just that using mice designed with genes that shine when neurons become active. Researchers used laser-driven microscopes to record how individual cells within an animal’s visual cortex light up when processing flashing images.
Scientists at the Allen Institute then analyzed small parts of brain tissue using a special tool that shaves it into over 25,000 layers, much thinner than human hair. Using electron microscopes, we took almost 100 million high-resolution images of those sections, illuminated those spaghetti-like fibers, and painstakingly reassembled 3D data.
Finally, Princeton University scientists used artificial intelligence to track all the wires and “painted each of the individual wires into a different color so that they could be individually identified,” explained Colman.
Jenny Burns / Allen Institute / AP 
They estimated that if microscope wiring was laid out, it would measure more than three miles (5 kilometers). Importantly, matching mouse brain activity with all its anatomy when watching the film allowed researchers to track how the circuit works.
Princeton researchers also created digital 3D copies of the data that other scientists can use to develop new research.
Will this kind of mapping help scientists ultimately find treatment for brain disease? Researchers call it the fundamental steps, such as how the human genome project, which provided the initial gene mapping, ultimately led to gene-based therapy. Mapping the brain of a full mouse is one of the next goals:
“The technology developed by this project gives us the first opportunity to actually identify any abnormal connection patterns that cause a disturbance,” says another researcher from Princeton neuroscientist Sebastian Soon, the project’s leading researcher.
The work “advances major leap and provides invaluable community resources for future discoveries,” said Harvard neuroscientists Mariella Petkova and Gregor Schunecht, who were not involved in the project.
The vast, published data “helps unraveling the complex neural networks underlying cognition and behavior,” they added.
The Machine Intelligence Consortium from Cortical Network, or Micron, was funded by the National Institutes of Health Brain Initiative and IARPA by Intelligence Advance’s Research Project Activities.
