This beautiful picture—worthy, perhaps, of an art gallery—came from a tiny sample of a woman’s brain. Back in the year 2014, during epilepsy surgery, a tiny piece of her cerebral cortex was removed. This cubic millimeter of brain tissue has enabled a team of scientists at Harvard and Google to create the most detailed wiring diagram of the human brain ever made.

Over more than a decade, biologists and machine-learning researchers have built an interactive map of this brain tissue that contains some 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. This atlas shows cells wrapping around themselves, mirrored pairs of cells, and the presence of egg-shaped “objects” defying classical description. This detailed diagram is expected to propel scientific investigation into the workings of human neural circuits and perhaps even the mechanisms underlying neurological disorders.

“By imaging connections at an incredibly high resolution and analyzing them on a large scale, we may expose patterns in the wiring,” Daniel Berger, a lead researcher on the project and an expert in connectomics—research into neural connections—explains. “This could give us models that provide a mechanistic explanation of cognitive processes and memory storage.”

News Desk