Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: “We’ve never really seen the brain – it’s been hiding in plain sight.” Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the “connectome”, and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.
December 29, 2009 at 6:30 pm
This stuff is BEAUTIFUL…thanks for the heads-up, man.
December 30, 2009 at 3:31 am
You are again terrific with the posts!
Lovin’ ya!
A.Shamus
December 30, 2009 at 3:35 am
Thanks Shamus!