The creation of such a map-dubbed the “connectome” almost simultaneously by Olaf Sporns of Indiana University and Patric Hagmann of Lausanne University Hospital (Switzerland) in a 2005 instance of “multiple discovery”-would require researchers to map every connection between neurons in the brain and the rest of the human nervous system. New computational methods are helping them analyze these data and study them in tandem with other data sets (neuroimaging, genetic, clinical, etc.) to gain new insights on the brain.įind out more at. Researchers all over the world continue to use HCP data and the procedural protocols created by the HCP.
Launched in 2009, it relied on diffusion imaging to trace how various regions of the brain are connected in both healthy individuals and people with various neurological disorders and diseases. The HCP is a massive NIH-funded collaboration to use neuroimaging to map connectivity in the brain. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
“The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and great stretches of unknown territory.” Among other applications, this understanding could provide insights about how the brain develops and ages and how certain diseases or disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and psychosis, are related to specific changes in neural pathways. In practical terms, understanding the human brain’s connections and pathways might enable researchers to better understand how certain thoughts and behaviors are originated and maintained. By visualizing connections as the equivalents of highways and sideroads serving large cities or rural areas, we could potentially understand how our neural circuits treat information and guide our behavior-as well as how the nervous system’s structure and function are linked. Imagine being able to see our brains as a map. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Consortium of the Human Connectome Project (). Image courtesy of the USC Laboratory of Neuro Imaging and Athinoula A.
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