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This Is the Most Detailed Map of Human Brain Connections Ever Made (www.wired.com)

submitted 3 months ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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In 2014, a woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy had a tiny chunk of her cerebral cortex removed. This cubic millimeter of tissue has allowed Harvard and Google researchers to produce the most detailed wiring diagram of the human brain that the world has ever seen.

Biologists and machine-learning experts spent 10 years building an interactive map of the brain tissue, which contains approximately 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It shows cells that wrap around themselves, pairs of cells that seem mirrored, and egg-shaped “objects” that, according to the research, defy categorization. This mind-blowingly complex diagram is expected to help drive forward scientific research, from understanding human neural circuits to potential treatments for disorders.

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[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

At the time, it was assumed that genes and traits had a mostly one-to-one correspondence. Thanks to the human genome project we now know that it’s more often a many-to-many correspondence, which makes figuring out the relationships enormously more complex. But mapping the genome was still a critical step.

Edit: The analogous situation in neurology would be the correspondence between brain regions and cognitive functions—in the last decade or two we've found out that most functions involve many separate brain regions networked together in different patterns for different functions. Mapping this “connectome” is the equivalent of mapping the genome—but this Harvard/Google neuron-mapping project is at a much lower level, more akin to studying the physical structure of chromosomes.

[–] treefrog@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

As well as revealing epigenetics. Which killed the nature/nurture shit.