{"id":25667,"date":"2025-04-09T15:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T15:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25667"},"modified":"2025-04-09T15:26:50","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T15:26:50","slug":"scientists-map-miles-of-wiring-in-a-speck-of-mouse-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25667","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Map Miles of Wiring in a Speck of Mouse Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is no use asking for the impossible,\u201d Dr. Crick wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s brain \u2014 less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data \u2014 the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a milestone,\u201d said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s totally doable, and I think it\u2019s worth doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

More than 130 years<\/a> have passed since the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ram\u00f3n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One type of cell mapped by the scientists, called a Martinotti cell, sends out inhibitory signals that dampen the activity of other neurons in the brain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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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.\u201cIt is no use asking for the impossible,\u201d 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\u2019s brain \u2014 less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data \u2014 the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.\u201cThis is a milestone,\u201d 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.\u201cIt\u2019s totally doable, and I think it\u2019s worth doing,\u201d he said.More than 130 years have passed since the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ram\u00f3n 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.One type of cell mapped by the scientists, called a Martinotti cell, sends out inhibitory signals that dampen the activity of other neurons in the brain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25669,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25670,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25667\/revisions\/25670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}