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Scientists Map Half a Billion Connections in a Tiny Piece of Mouse Brain

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), the Allen Institute, and Princeton University have created the largest 3D wiring diagram of a mouse brain — which is extremely similar to our own — in the hopes of learning principles from the brain that might aid progress AI, according to a press release.

The map you see above depicts the intricate structures and connections of roughly 200,000 brain cells and almost 500 million synapses — all hidden in a cubic millimeter chunk of mouse brain the size of a grain of sand.

What's more, the dataset is unique in that it includes recordings of activity patterns elicited by a variety of complex visual stimuli, ranging from YouTube clips to Hollywood movies, for approximately 75,000 brain cells in the same brain volume that was used to generate the connectivity map.

500 million synapses’ worth of data available 

The map took five years to create, with three distinct stages. The researchers focused their investigation on the visual neocortex, a brain area that is critical for visual perception. The researchers collected measurements of the mouse's typical brain activity while it was still alive in the first stage, producing over 70,000 pictures of active brain cells.  

More:

https://interestingengineering.com/scientists-map-half-a-billion-connections-in-a-tiny-piece-of-mouse-brain

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