The largest and most comprehensive 3D map of a mammalian brain to date offers an unprecedented insight into how neurons connect and function. The new map, which captures a cubic millimetre of a mouse's visual cortex, will allow scientists to study brain function in extraordinary detail, potentially revealing crucial insights into how neural activity shapes behaviour, how complex traits like consciousness arise, and even what it means to be human. "Our behaviours ultimately arise from activity in the brain, and brain tissue shares very similar properties in all mammals," says team member Forrest Collman at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. "This is one reason we believe insights about the mouse cortex can generalise to humans." The achievement – something that biologist Francis Crick said in 1979 was "impossible" – took seven years to complete and involved 150 researchers from three institutions.

Humans have learned to travel through space, eradicate diseases and understand nature at the breathtakingly tiny level of fundamental particles. Yet we have no idea how consciousness – our ability to experience and learn about the world in this way and report it to others – arises in the brain. In fact, while scientists have been preoccupied with understanding consciousness for centuries, it remains one of the most important unanswered questions of modern neuroscience. Now our new study, published in Science Advances, sheds light on the mystery by uncovering networks in the brain that are at work when we are conscious. Humans have learned to travel through space, eradicate diseases and understand nature at the breathtakingly tiny level of fundamental particles.

Google and Facebook have an almost perfect log of your comings and goings and they can combine that information with artificial intelligence to predict things about you. The systems are big and sophisticated, but their capabilities are still a far cry from the friendly, charismatic Samantha in the movie Her or the devilish, horrifying HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After all, no one wants a HAL taking us out.) But algorithms are slowly getting smarter. Computer scientists are programming systems that can teach themselves to play Atari games and poker, all on their own.

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about AI. It's understandable because the technology is quickly seeping into every corner of modern life, present in everything from Autonomous Vehicles to I-phone's Siri. As AI automates repetitive tasks, adds intelligence to existing products, achieves impossible accuracy, and adapts through progressive learning it will become the most important technological phenomena of the 22nd century -- second, perhaps, only to the Blockchain. The exact definition of AI is hotly debated and there are already many fantastic explanations of AI on the internet, so I won't dive in too deeply. But broadly speaking, AI is advanced statistics and applied mathematics which harnesses new advances in computing power and the explosion of available data to give computers new powers of inference, recognition, and choice. Machine learning (ML), the most promising subset of AI, is a field that aims to teach computers to learn from examples (or "Data") and perform a task without being explicitly programmed to do so.

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The Neurosciences Institute is a non-profit scientific research organization dedicated to learning about the brain for the benefit of humankind. Founded by the late Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman, the Institute focuses its research on the principles underlying how we perceive and act upon the world, how we learn and remember, and how consciousness arises. The Neurosciences Institute is dedicated to increasing knowledge about how the brain works at the most fundamental levels. By that, we mean defining the fundamental principles of anatomy and physiology that enable the brain and nervous system to carry out their myriad functions. Although many facts are known about the nervous system from the molecular to the cellular to the tissue levels and new information is being discovered every day, a generally agreed-upon set of basic overall principles that would explain how we see, how we move, or how we are conscious remains elusive.