A new high-resolution map of how the brain is wired

Amazing stuff! This could well revolutionize our understanding of the brain! The speed of progress in brain research in recent years has been nothing but breathtaking! This is about a major expansion of the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas.

"Their study, which was published today in the journal Nature, traced thousands of connections between brain areas and lays the groundwork for researchers to better understand how brain circuitry might go awry in diseases and disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

The publicly available dataset resulting from approximately a thousand new experiments represents the most detailed map of connections in a mammalian brain to date, tracing neural wiring within and between the thalamus and cortex ... The newly acquired dataset captures connections between neurons in the thalamus and the cortex, using special labels to light up five different kinds of neurons that inhabit different layers of the cortex. The mouse brain has approximately 85 million neurons that make roughly 100 billion connections, or synapses."

A new high-resolution map of how the brain is wired Systematic tracing of how neurons connect reveals mammalian brain’s ‘org chart’ of possible information flow