Summary: Connectomics researchers aim to map and understand how individual neurons connect to each other to form functional networks.<\/p>\n
Source: Harvard<\/p>\n
Many of us have seen microscopic images of neurons in the brain\u2014each neuron appearing as a glowing cell in a vast sea of blackness.<\/p>\n
This image is misleading: Neurons don\u2019t exist in isolation. In the human brain, some 86 billion neurons form 100 trillion connections to each other\u2014numbers that, ironically, are far too large for the human brain to fathom.<\/p>\n
Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Harvard Medical School associate professor of neurology at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital, is working in a new field of neuroscience called connectomics, which aims to comprehensively map connections between neurons in the brain.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe brain is structured so that each neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons, and so to understand what a single neuron is doing, ideally you study it within the context of the rest of the neural network,\u201d Lee explained.<\/p>\n
Lee recently spoke to Harvard Medicine News about the promise of connectomics. He also described his own research, which combines connectomics with information on neural activity to explore neural circuits that underlie behavior.<\/p>\n