Cerebral Cortex And Its Millions Of Neural Fibers Gets A Map

"Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to ...," said Buckaroo Banzai while doing brain surgery in an early scene from one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. He couldn't have been more correct. A complete high-resolution map of the human cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking, has been created and it identified a single network core (or hub) that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain - detailing millions of neural fibers. The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. It not only provides a comprehensive map of brain connections (the brain "connectome"), but also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science termed "connectomics." Read More...

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