The benefits of brain mapping

Many scientists now believe that real progress on learning how the brain works can be made only through highly funded, inter­disciplinary big science...

There are roughly as many neurons in the human brain as there are pages on the Internet, give or take a million or so. But brain wiring is orders of magnitude more complex than the web. “Think about it like this,” says Konrad Kording, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who is interviewed in a News Feature on page 272 that describes the task ahead for two billion-dollar research programmes to understand the brain. “Whereas Internet pages only link to a couple of others in a linear way, each neuron links to thousands of others — and does so in a nonlinear way.”

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