Although the brain may look like a featureless grey blob, it is one of the most mysterious and complex organs in our bodies. Within all of those strange folds and wrinkles are actually dozens and dozens of highly-specialized, invisible territories – each with a specific job that allows you to live your life as you know it.
Each specialized territory is made up of groups of neurons that are activated when we do certain tasks, such as read, raise our hand, or recognize faces. For nearly 100 years, we were aware of just 83 individual regions of the brain – but a new study by Dr. Glasser and the Human Connectome Project completely upends this thinking. This new research found there to actually be at least a total of 180 individual regions – that is 97 more regions that we previously thought existed!
The project and research team recorded “high-resolution images of each participant’s brain, and then recorded its activity during hours of tests on memory, language, and other kinds of thought. In previous attempts to map the cortex, scientists typically had looked only at one kind of evidence at a time – say, the arrangement of cells. The Human Connectome Project has made it possible to study the brain in much greater detail.”
One of the most unique aspects of this research was that the scientists not only looked at the activity of the brain, but also its anatomy. To do this, they measured amounts of different substances in the brain such as myelin, which is a fatty substance that is used to insulate neurons. The levels of myelin can differ greatly in different areas of the brain, which is a key factor to dissecting the workings of the brain.
Using these activity and anatomy parameters, the research team sought out to re-map the brain. This has resulted in a new and improved map of our brains, showing that previously identified regions are actually collections of smaller regions divvied up. The team achieved this by using advanced brain scanners and AI computer programs that “learned to identify the brains hidden regions from vast amounts of data collected from hundreds of test subjects, a far more sophisticated and broader effort than had been previously attempted.”
This kind of data is really “an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind”. This knowledge will help scientists and doctors better understand the workings of the brain, and therefore be able to better treat illness and disease, such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and many others.
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Researchers will now be able to use this same brain-mapping methodology to map an individual’s brain in just over an hour of scanning. This is unprecedented.
This news is groundbreaking for neuroscientists around the world, because it gives us the opportunity to know and understand the brain and how it functions in a much more holistic manner. As David Kleinfeld, a neuroscientist at UCSD, so eloquently stated, “It’s a step towards understanding why we’re we.”
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While this is one of the most important advances in neuroscience to date, this new brain map is only just beginning. Just because these new regions have been identified as existing, there is still decades of research to be done in order to understand what each region is doing, and why. Scientists hypothesize that these different regions can be broken up into even more specific regions as well. In a sense, we can think of this new, improved brain map as ‘version 1.0’. There will likely be a version 2.0, 3.0, and so on as our knowledge of the brain continues to grow and evolve.
“The next big step is seeing what this can do for us in terms of buying more [brain] power…”
Article Curated from:
New York Times Health
