First 3-D Road Map Of A Brain's Connections

Note: Slightly larger shot HERE in case you want to plan a vacation or something.

This is a 3-D map of the neural connections in an owl-monkey's brain. Now I don't wanna jump to any conclusions, but I suspect it leads to buried treasure. Keep your eyes peeled for booby traps.

Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: "We've never really seen the brain - it's been hiding in plain sight." Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the "connectome", and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.

Petabyte-level data? Damn. Tell you what -- you feed me for a week and I'll let you map my brain. It's more on the kilobyte-level. Just don't complain when the map turns out to be an animated gif of a penis dancing to peanut butter jelly time.

First 3D Map of the Brain's Connections [gearfuse]

Thanks to Brian, who, if you reverse the I and A in his name spells Brain. COINCIDENCE? I think not! Yes.

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