A landmark study revealed that nerve cells in the brain form a simple checkerboard grid pattern. In the new study, a research team led by Dr. Van J. Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School used diffusion MRI (a.k.a. "diffusion tensor imaging") to obtain detailed wiring diagrams of the brain. “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables-folding 2-D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,†Wedeen says. “This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species.†\n“Getting a high-resolution wiring diagram of our brains is a landmark in human neuroanatomy,†says NIMH Director Dr. Thomas R. Insel. “This new technology may reveal individual differences in brain connections that could aid diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders.†\nTensors find their usefulness in yet another practical application. Check it out: \n[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CySDbTH46P4[/media]
This is interesting. Is there a paper or an article referencing the original study? I definitely wanna read it!
Articles Mass. General-led study reveals simple structure underlying complexity of the primate brain The brain is full of Manhattan-like grids And many others... Papers can be searched for at PMC - NCBI. Here's one of Whedeen's: The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways
Thank you very much. The implications of finding some sort of structural pattern of neural pathways in the brain are fucking vast.
Some pics of ribbon cable-like neural projections in primate brains. Not a bowl of spaghetti like once thought.
Neat thing is, that's just the tip of the iceberg. I personally never thought of the brain like a bowl of spaghetti, more like a complex order that is so massive it just looks like a jumbled mess. You got to think, there has to be some sort of organization going on.. one neat lil factoid I learned from The Royal Institute's Christmas lecture on the brain, is if you laid all the neurons and connections between neurons end to end, it would circle the globe almost 4 times. That's one brain, your brain, my brain, anyone's brain.. having enough neurons and connections to travel across the world 4 times. That's brain blowing..
It is brain blowing! lol There are roughly 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain with roughly 100 TRILLION connections. Each neuron is directly connected to, again roughly, on the average 1000 other neurons, though this can range from just one to as many as 100,000. There are a great variety of neuron types as well as connection types. The bowl of spaghetti metaphor was due to the astronomical density of the various dendritic arbors and axonal pathways, even withing a fraction of a cubic millimeter of brain matter. Neurons and their connectivity represent only half the complexity of the brain. Researchers are now beginning to find out the glial cells, whose roles were once thought to be mainly to support and clean up after neurons, may also contribute significantly to information processing. See R. Douglas Field's great book, The Other Brain: The Scientific and Medical Breakthroughs That Will Heal Our Brains and Revolutionize Our Health for some fascinating insight into the brain's neuroglial system. Fields is Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institutes of Health, NICHD, in Bethesda, Maryland. There's also a great YouTube video simulating the compactness of the neuroglia in a typical, one mm<sup>3</sup> volume but I cant find it.
That's another interesting thing, the number of connections formed. If you do the math on it.. and if you wanted to scan and read every single connection in your brain, you would have to scan at an average of about 32,000 connections every second.. 24/7.. for the next 100 years. That's why it is taking so long for us to crack the brain.. currently the most complex natural formation we know of.
Goddam!!!!!!! And its a dynamic system, too. Used connection are always being strengthened while unused ones are pruned. And how axons are molecularly guided to other neurons for establishing a synaptic connection is wild as fuck!
Yeah.. lol, that part is kind of depressing. Not really, but it's like "man, somewhere in my brain right now, a connection is withering away and dying" but at the same time, new ones are being formed. I fucking love the brain. I wish I could view mine in real time.. but sadly I'll probably be long gone by the time our technology reaches that peak.
The brain is such a profound deal! I'm completely blown away to think that somehow, distributions of conditionally determined spiking patterns can result in the sensation of having a mind and being the subjective experiencer of "me" Some mighty strange shit there, my friend!