Name: How Close Are We to a Complete Map of the Human Brain?
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T02:22:17.000Z
Duration: 10 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When you think about all the things humans have put their mind to, it’s impressive:

we built and landed robots on Mars to learn more about space.

We conjured up theories about how the universe works — and then proved them right.

We sequenced the human genome to paint a complete picture of our dna. but as for the minds that

made this all possible, we still don’t know much about how those actually work.

Scientists have been trying to navigate the mechanics of our large, complicated brains

What would be really helpful is if we had a map.

And in order to get one of those, we’re going to need some brave scientists and very

So how close are we to mapping the human brain?

If we could build a complete map of our brain and translate it, imagine what we could do:

We think maybe that will give us clues as to the causes of various forms of mental illness,

learning difficulties, diseases of aging.

And that might better allow us to figure out, are there treatments?

Or prevent the onset of some of those illnesses.

A map of the brain could even help us understand other scientific mysteries, like the origins

Our brain is so powerful that if we better understood how it worked, we might be able

There is this technology in our brain for ... actually, in the brain of every mammal,

A map of the human brain is seen as so valuable that multiple efforts across the world are

Aside from some big projects in the U.S. — we’ll get to those later — the European commission

is funding 100 universities to create a detailed computer model of the human brain.

China also announced a project to map the brain, and so has Japan.

There’s even several private projects focused on this goal.

So what do we mean when we say a map of the human brain?

Specifically, we’re talking about creating something called a “connectome” — a

complete catalog of all the structures in the brain and how they connect.

We typically think of there being both a structural and a functional connectome.

So the structural connectome is the white matter fibers that connect different parts

of the brain or the synapses that connect neurons.

And we call that structural because there's a physical synapse there that we can measure

We're kind of making more of a roadmap of connections among brain regions.But there's

also what we call functional connections in the human brain, which have to do with kind

of coordination and function across brain regions.

That means identifying parts of the brain that work together but don’t necessarily

We don’t have any fully mapped functional connectomes yet and the only structural connectome

we’ve fully mapped is of “C elegans,” a transparent nematode about 1 millimeter

Even though they've been able to do that, it's still a complex organism.

And there's still a lot of work to be done to understand how the interactions give rise

to even the relatively simple behaviors that the C elegans can accomplish.

The connectome of the c. elegans brain identifies 302 neurons.

And if researching and building that connectome was complicated, now imagine how exponentially

more difficult it is to do the same with humans, who have somewhere in the region of 100 billion

This is probably the first obstacle scientists have to overcome in mapping our brains — the

So, they have to start small, and I mean really small — the samples they are studying are

Inside that small grain of sand, there's about 100,000 neurons and form about one billion

So now, you see our brain is more than a million times bigger than this grain of sand, so you

can see how much units are compressed in such a small space.

And the brain is always changing, which makes it even more difficult to study.

When we're born, the brain grows over the course of development.

It builds new neurons, we're learning and interacting with the environment and that's

also shaping brain connections and how different parts of the brain work together.

but then it also starts to change as we get older and we move into later in life.

To tackle these challenges, the Obama administration started the Brain Initiative in 2014, bringing

several scientific institutions together to understand and treat the human mind.

As part of that coalition, the Allen Institute is analyzing mouse brain samples to count,

catalog, and connect the many different cell types — as a foundation for eventually doing

Using electron microscopy, the team imaged billions of tiny synaptic connections in a

Mapping the, the brain, at least at the resolution that we do it is difficult because many things

Scientists had to section the grain-sized brain sample into 25,000 pristine slices 40

For reference, a strand of hair is five times as thick as that.

Then those slices were distributed over six electron microscopes to be photographed.

It took us about five months to take all the pictures of that millimeter cube.I don't have

the final tally, but there's certainly hundreds of millions of those.

This type of data gathering took exhaustive, dedicated work around the clock.

When all the images were collected, researchers could then segment each single neuron and

create a 3D wiring diagram...step one towards that complete structural connectome, which

the team estimates will take five years to finish.

In terms of data storage was about two petabytes of data.

That’s about 2 million gigabytes from just a millimeter.

To eventually work with bigger human brain samples, something about this process will

have to change, as it will eventually be the largest data set ever collected about anything

I think substantial, substantial advances on sample preparations, sample sectioning.

And above all, the storage of such will be immense.

Either technology will have to evolve in a way that such storage is available or our

sampling will have to evolve in ways that we can compress that, that information that

We’ll also need forms of technology that aren’t as invasive as this, so we can study

And to develop a really robust map, we’re going to need to work with more than just

We’ll need to study young brains, old brains, male brains, female brains.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Close Are We to a Complete Map of the Human Brain?

cognitive

eventually

matter

initiative