Detailed Brain Mapping Outlines What We Can — and Can’t — Know
Your brain, fully mapped, would take up a good part of the internet. And then it would just change againRecently, a cubic millimetre (one millionth) of the human brain was imaged in sections via an electron microscope and found to contain 1.4 petabytes of data of nerve cells, blood cells, etc. A petabyte would be like taking over 4,000 digital photos per day through your entire life, as Monique Brouilette reports. But that wasn’t the big surprise: Cells were seen that were never seen in other animals, for example, “It is like discovering a new continent,” said Jeff Lichtman of Harvard, the senior author of the paper that presented these results. He described a menagerie of puzzling features that his team had already spotted in the human tissue, including new types of cells never seen in other animals, such Read More ›