NEW BEAUTIFUL BRAIN CONNECTIONS

You have trillions of connections in your brain. And when you think about all the people you are directly connected to in life, the collective connections are exponentially mind-boggling.

Advances in brain imagery are allowing scientists to understand more about how these connections form, work, and fail. Check out these amazing findings and the gorgeous images they produced.

CONNECTION: BRAIN ACTIVITY MAP

The  Brain Activity Map, a key project of the BRAIN Initiative, launched by Obama last year, is to be funded by $3 billion over the next ten years, as an effort to map of the connections in the human brain. The hope is that it might help us better understand diseases like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s.

CONNECTIONS: CONNECTOMES

As a result of a truly landmark study, scientists have recently published the mouse “connectome,” the first wiring diagram of a mouse brain in the journal Nature.

It shows how each of the millions or billions of neurons in a brain connect to thousands of other neurons, via axons. These connections enable different regions of the brain to communicate with each other to produce behavior, intelligence, and personality.

Scientists led by Hongkui Zeng of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, developed the The Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas. It is the first detailed map of any mammal's neural network.

The researchers injected fluorescing viruses into precise spots in the brains of living mice. When the glowing virus protein diffuses throughout the neurons and their axons, the connections show up in tissue samples under a microscope.

The map revealed several surprises: Connections on the sides of the brain "seem to be always stronger" than those that cross hemispheres.

Results suggest that a small number of strong connections and a large number of weak connections may be a fundamental network organization structure to allow greater capacity of information processing.

While the mouse connectome shows millions of connections, the human brain has some 86 billion neurons, each making as many as 10,000 connections.

Connectomes have been drawn up for other animals, including humans, but they are much more crude, showing connections between brain regions rather than brain cells.

The Human Connectome Project, which the National Institutes of Health announced in 2010, is being produced using special technique called diffusion tensor imaging in living brains.

CONNECTIONS: RETINA

Neuroscientist Jinseop Kim, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and his colleagues wanted to learn more about how the brain processes visual data. They explored the connections between various types of cells in the retina.

A new map of neural connections in mouse retina give new insights into how the eyes detect motion.

The map was created with the help of 2,200 volunteers members of EyeWire, an online ‘citizen-science’ game set up to help with brain-mapping efforts.

Information is processed partly by neurons in the retina. And the retina is sensitive to the direction and speed of moving images.

The EyeWire players analyzed high-resolution electron microscope images of the mouse retina and traced pathways through the layers of cells to create a high-resolution wiring diagram.

CONNECTION: DISEASE & CURE

These are mouse neurons that researchers in Guoping Feng’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have stained to reveal a protein related to autism and other brain disorders.

CONNECTIONS: BRAINBOW

This mouse was genetically engineered to express fluorescent proteins of varying color combinations in its neurons. The image above shows the dentate gyrus portion of the brain, located it the hippocampus, where memory forms.

This labeling process, called Brainbow, allows scientists to more easily distinguish individual cells and connections in the brain.

CONNECTIONS: NERVE FIBERS

A special MRI scanning technique, called diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), traces the direction of water flow as it diffuses along the fatty sheaths around nerve fibers.

It reveals a complex network of fibers. The image above, taken  at Zeynep Saygin/Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents only a small portion of the neural connections in the brain.

Read more about Beautiful Connections, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including A Bounty of Beautiful Connections.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Connections in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 06.22.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!

PHOTO CREDITS:

1. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Connections.
2. Image: Courtesy of Biocision. Human Neuronal Progenitor and Stem Cells.
3. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Connections.
4. Image: Courtesy of Allen Institute for Brain Science. Down the avenues and alleyways.
5. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Connections.
6. Image: Courtesy of Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Down the avenues and alleyways.”
7. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Connections.
8. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Cross section of a mouse brain.
9. Image: Courtesy of theAllen Institute for Brain Science. Cross section of a mouse brain.
10. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Details.
11. Image: Courtesy of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Mouse Brain Connections.
12. Image: by Johanna Bergmann & Erhan Genç. Human Connectome.
13. Image: Courtesy of Nature International Weekly Center of Science. Interconnection of neurons in a mouse retina.
14. Image: Courtesy of Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. Neurons in a Section of Mouse Retina.
15. Image: Courtesy of Guoping Feng, Michael Wells/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Mouse Neurons.
16. Photo: Courtesy of Harvard University.  Mouse’s dentate gyrus.
17. Image: Courtesy of MIT. Diffusion weighted image (DWI) of nerve fibers in human brain.