An advance in brain research that was once considered impossible

Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections. 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 millimetre of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding. “It is no use asking for the impossible,” 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 millimetre of a mouse’s brain – less than 1% of its full volume.



In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data – the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video. “This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published last week in the journal Nature.

Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimetre of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse..