Like the sail trembling with the violence of the spirit, doth my wisdom cross the sea—my wild wisdom!
Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion (one million billion) connections. It’s through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now.
related { Is a project to map the brain’s full communications network worth the money? }
illustration { Trevor Brown }
