An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible

[mahatmakanejeeves]

An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible
Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.

By Carl Zimmer
April 9, 2025
Updated 2:29 p.m. ET

The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding. ... “It is no use asking for the impossible,” Dr. Crick wrote.

Forty-six years later, a team of more than 100 scientists has achieved that impossible, by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.

“This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse. ... “It’s totally doable, and I think it’s worth doing,” he said.

More than 130 years have passed since the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first spied individual neurons under a microscope, making out their peculiar branched shapes. Later generations of scientists worked out many of the details of how a neuron sends a spike of voltage down a long arm, called an axon. Each axon makes contact with tiny branches, or dendrites, of neighboring neurons. Some neurons excite their neighbors into firing voltage spikes of their own. Some quiet other neurons. ... Human thought somehow emerges from this mix of excitation and inhibition. But how that happens has remained a tremendous mystery, largely because scientists have been able to study only a few neurons at a time.

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A small fraction of the neurons that were mapped in one cubic millimeter of mouse brain. Allen Institute

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Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column.

[erronis]

1. Ah, science. May it survive the ideologues.

Thanks for this fascinating article.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. The energy demands and computing power to scan everyone's brain will dwarf Crypto and AI

But it might help tumor or cancer patients, and maybe they can find moods and bad thoughts, or sociopaths.

Have the psychologists been told? They will want to preserve their turf.

[lastlib]

3. They charted 200,000 cells?

Damn, they could do tRump's entire brain before breakfast tomorrow!