Google researchers recently published the largest and most detailed map of the human brain to date. The map depicts just one cubic millimeter of brain tissue (half the size of a grain of rice), but with enough resolution to show individual neurons and their interconnections, and required 1.4 petabytes of data to encode.
Though it’s only a small part of the brain, the map has led to some surprising discoveries. “For example, we found that some of the neurons form giant knots,” says Viren Jain, a research scientist at Google. “We don’t know why that is the case; no one has ever seen that before.”
Now Viren and his team are studying mouse brains, and for good reason: these mammals may help solve mysteries about the mind that have remained unsolved since the dawn of humanity: How are memories stored and retrieved? How do we recognize objects and faces? Why do we need so much sleep? What goes wrong in Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases?
“One of the reasons we can’t answer these questions is because we don’t yet have the data we need to study the brain,” Viren said.
The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons connected to each other by more than 100 trillion synapses that enable us to think, feel, move, and interact with the world. Creating a map of these neural connections (called the “connectome”) is providing new understanding of how the brain works, and why it sometimes doesn’t.
To create detailed maps at the synapse level, researchers need to image the brain at nanometer resolution and process vast amounts of data — a significant technical challenge that requires ongoing innovation in imaging techniques, AI algorithms, and data management tools, which is why Google Research formed the Connectomics team 10 years ago.
