PROGRESS TOWARD UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEX CIRCUITRY OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
January 25, 2012 An article published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal provides an excellent, and optimistic, overview of progress being made to better understand the circuitry of the human brain. This is clearly a huge undertaking, given that the brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, with approximately 10,000 synapses branching from each one of these.
One major effort is being undertaken by the Human Connectome Project. Funded by the NIH, researchers at a number of institutions will utilize several different imaging techniques – including a novel technique known as ‘diffusion magnetic-resonance imaging’ – to map the brain’s largest conduits. The brains of 1,200 healthy young adults, including 300 pairs of twins, will be scanned. The resulting information will be analyzed on the Project’s supercomputer, together with each individual’s demographic information and medical records, with the goal of gaining significant insight into the brain’s neural connections. Ultimately, it is hoped that this information will lead to a better understanding of how an individual's brain circuitry shapes healthy brain behavior, or instead results in brain disorders.
"In essence, we will match form and function," said project principal investigator David Van Essen at Washington University in St. Louis.
Other notable efforts include those of Sebastian Seung at MIT, who is working to automate the mapping of individual synapses, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where researchers recently released a three-dimensional map illustrating the neural connections within the mouse brain, and are in the process of developing an interactive ‘human brain atlas’. Allen Institute researchers are optimistic that these efforts, together with data obtained via the Human Connectome Project, will ultimately lead to greater insight into how the brain’s circuitry and underlying genes are related.
One particularly optimistic development noted in the Journal’s article pertains to the more open sharing of information among brain researchers. Pooled information is already being used by Michael Milham at the Child Mind Institute in New York to better understand the physical circuitry of the brain. According to Milham:
"People are seeing more of the merits of sharing … but there is still a lot of pushback."
Going forward, it is hoped that the sharing of data will increase, and that this, together with novel imaging and automated data analysis techniques, will result not only in a greater understanding of how the normal brain is structured, but will also provide valuable insight into various disorders of the brain.