Wrapping Our Minds Around Our Minds

Neuroscientists on the cutting edge of research are often blindly probing into their subjects’ brains using only two-dimensional images as guides. This is all changing now with the progress of brain scanning technology and the international digital age. Scientists are combining advanced mapping techniques to create digital, interactive models of an animal’s brain, using the Internet to make it available to the entire world. Like the transition from maps to GPS systems, this has changed the way researchers visualize, think about, and navigate our most treasured organ.

There are many techniques used to image brains, and each has its unique strengths and weaknesses. The new atlas being offered on the Internet combines all of these scanning techniques to tell as much information as possible, while closing the gaps within individual techniques. These atlases even have the ability to trace gene expressions in the brain, combining the relatively young science of the genome with visualizations of the brain. This provides a concrete link between genes and how their expressions manifest within the brain, yielding a greater understanding of the genome and perhaps, in the future, having implications for gene therapies that treat neurological diseases.

In addition, researchers can combine the images from many healthy subjects of the same species and create an “averaged” brain. This would be the closest thing we have to a stereotypical, model brain of a particular species. By comparing diseased brains to these averaged atlases, we could potentially map the types of abnormalities that manifest in each disorder, making greater strides towards a complete understanding of every neurological disease and, hopefully, leading to treatments and cures.

Certain imaging techniques allow scientists to zoom into our brains, eventually getting down to the individual neurons. A human brain can have upwards of 10¹⁰ neurons with 10¹⁴ connections between them. The next step in visualizing the brain is creating a comprehensive connectome, a map of the neuronal connections. The essence of a brain is the electrical signals that relay across these connections and through the body, translating into movement, attention, memory, beliefs, our being. Stopping at a brain atlas without developing an understanding of the neurons and their interconnections would be like using a GPS to navigate through a town but having no idea of its people, politics, and culture. As there is more to a town than its roads, the brain is more than its gross structures. Many drugs that doctors prescribe work directly on neurotransmitters (a neuron’s signaling chemical) and synapses (points of neuronal communication), so a connectome could offer scientists a chance to reveal increasingly accurate mechanisms by which new drugs can work more efficiently to eradicate a disorder.

With the sheer number of neurons and connections, the completion of a comprehensive brain atlas is a daunting task, but it exemplifies the progress of science and technology. This atlas requires the accumulation of years’ worth of data, from both in vivo and post-mortem tests. The work of hundreds of scientists lives on in the current brain atlas, aiding research across the world.

Not only is this project a testament to science and technology, but it also carries on the spirit of digital progress. The brain atlas can be found on the web, available to anyone with an Internet connection. These developers even offer free versions for educational purposes. Perhaps scientists can take this to the next level, creating an open-source version of this software, so that when a problem arises with the commercial version, individuals around the world can come together to fix it. The power of international crowd sourcing has been proven with the problem of protein structure. Scientists offered a free game that required you to figure out the protein structure of amino acids. Using this game, the collective mind of hundreds of gamers made great strides in determining previously unknown protein structures. Maybe this type of open-sourced approach would be worth a try with the brain atlas endeavor, accelerating our journey towards wrapping our minds around our own minds.

-Ian Park

To explore the brain for yourself, check out BrainNavigator and the Allen Brain Atlas.