|November 02, 2024Updated:November 04, 2024
A decade ago, a small and unassuming brain sample arrived at Dr. Jeff Lichtman’s lab at Harvard University. Measuring less than a grain of rice, the 1 cubic millimeter of tissue contained 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, each one a vital part of the brain’s intricate communication network.
Now, after a decade of collaboration with Google scientists, a monumental dataset—with 1,400 terabytes—has turned into the most detailed map of the human brain ever created.
“A terabyte is, for most people, gigantic, yet a fragment of a human brain—just a minscule, teeny-weeny little bit of human brain—is still thousands of terabytes,” Lichtman said in a National Institutes of Health report.
The detailed 3-D reconstruction reveals beautiful structures in the brain. Neurons forming dozens of connections, mirror-image neural pairs, and networks far more complex than expected, are just some of the groundbreaking discoveries.
“I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” said Viren Jain, a senior scientist at Google in Nature Magazine. “It felt sort of spiritual.”
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