Small brains, big data

When we think about big data, we usually think about the web: the billions of users of social media, the sensors on millions of mobile phones, the thousands of contributions to Wikipedia, and so forth. Due to recent innovations, web-scale data can now also come from a camera pointed at a small, but extremely complex object: the brain. New progress in distributed computing is changing how neuroscientists work with the resulting data -- and may, in the process, change how we think about computation. The brain consists of many neurons -- a hundred thousand in a fly or larval zebrafish, millions in a mouse, billions in a human. Its function depends on the neurons' activity, and how they communicate with one another.