Reading Brains: Milestone Reached!

A team of researchers managed to record the cellular activity and map more than half a million neural connections in a cubic millimetre of a mouse’s brain and, by extension, better understand how the human brain works as both organs share enough similarities.

“Imagine that you come to a party that has 80,000 people, and you can be aware of every conversation, but you don’t know who is talking to whom,” explains Dr. Nuno da Costa, a biologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and one of the project’s leaders. “And now imagine that you have a way to know who is talking to whom, but you have no idea what they’re saying. If you have these two things, you can tell a better story about what’s happening at the party.

In 2016, the American government invested $100 million as part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project, or MICrONS, for scientists from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton University, and Baylor College of Medicine to scan a cubic millimetre of a mouse brain. The milestone has now been reached. In less than 1% of a mouse brain’s volume, scientists have amassed 1.6 petabytes of data – the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video. They focused on a portion of the brain that receives signals from the eyes and reconstructs what the animal sees. The team charted 200,000 neurons and other types of brain cells and 523 million neural connections. As mouse brains and human brains are similar, research on rodents could help to find medications to effectively treat psychological disorders without causing harmful side effects to humans.