First map of mammal brain activity may have shown intuition in action

The first complete activity map of a mammalian brain has revealed unprecedented insights into how decisions are made – and may even hint at the roots of that mysterious feeling we call intuition. For decades, neuroscientists have wanted to capture activity across the whole brain at the level of individual neurons – but there is a limit to how many neurons an electrode can record from, how many electrodes can be implanted in a single brain and how many animals a single lab can test. To overcome this, researchers across 12 labs have joined forces, each running the same experiment but recording activity from different areas of the brain, with some overlap to ensure the data they collected was consistent. The combined data from more than 650,000 neurons has now produced the first brain-wide activity map of a complex behaviour. "This work demonstrates a completely new way of tackling complex questions in modern neuroscience," says Benedetto De Martino at University College London, who wasn't involved in the work.