So, we'd like to get even better, but there are technical limits of what one can achieve with modern technology. There are 13 projects funded already by the National Institutes of Health and several more that are likely to be funded in the coming year or so.Īnd a connectome - what exactly does that entail?Ī connectome - I like to say it's a comprehensive map of connections in the brain.īut then I immediately put 'comprehensive' in quotes because it's only to the resolution or ability to resolve the basic units of the human brain.Īnd for the Human Connectome Project, our resolving power are little, tiny-volume units that are a tenth of an inch or so on a side and literally contain hundreds of thousands of neurons and millions and million of synapses between neurons. There are also a number of projects that are focused on comparing connectomes in normals to connectomes in various either neurological or psychiatric diseases. We studied 1,200 healthy, young adults, and in projects that are just starting as the young adults Human Connectome Project wraps up, we'll be studying the development and structure and function and connectivity in children and in older adults to get a better picture of the entire human life-span. The Human Connectome Project started in 2010, and it's wrapping up in its current studies of the young adult Human Connectome. We map those on top of maps of the convolutions, or folds, of the cerebral cortex, which are analogous to the mountains and valleys of the Earth's surface.Īnd this is coming out of a longer-standing project, the Human Connectome Project. So, those four key things are what we were mapping to make this new parcellation or map of the brain.Īnd if I can add just a little bit, our focus is on the human cerebral cortex.Īnd what we're mapping are the equivalent by analogy of the political subdivisions of the Earth's surface. Its function - how different parts of the brain are connected.Īnd then, how individual areas of the brain are organized.
Its architecture - so, what is going on at the microscopic level. So, we're mapping basically four properties of how the brain is organized. There are some that map topography or roads or state boundaries. When we're talking about this map of the brain, even when we're talking about road maps, there are different types. Reporter Andrea Vasquez talks to Matthew Glasser and David Van Essen, neuroscientists at Washington University's School of Medicine, via Google Hangout.Īnd, Matthew Glasser and David Van Essen, thank you for joining us.
Louis, Missouri, have charted what may be the most accurate map of the brain to date. For more than a hundred years, neuroscientists have argued over a single, seemingly simple question - how many different areas make up the brain?Ī team of scientists at Washington University in St.
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