New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience

Sitting at the desk in his lower-campus office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the neuroscientist Tony Zador turned his computer monitor toward me to show off a complicated matrix-style graph. Imagine something that looks like a spreadsheet but instead of numbers it's filled with colors of varying hues and gradations. Casually, he said: "When I tell people I figured out the connectivity of tens of thousands of neurons and show them this, they just go'huh?' But when I show this to people …" He clicked a button onscreen and a transparent 3-D model of the brain popped up, spinning on its axis, filled with nodes and lines too numerous to count.