Harvard Researchers Create Largest-Known Map Of Portion of a Human Brain

Researchers at Harvard and Google have released the most detailed map of a section of the human brain to date.

The researchers — led by Jeff W. Lichtman, a neuroscientist, Biology professor, and the newly-appointed dean of Science — worked with scientists from Google. Lichtman’s team has been working with Google for almost 10 years.

The map was made from a cubic millimeter tissue sample taken from a 45-year-old patient who underwent surgery for epilepsy, and utilized a combination of electron microscopy images and AI algorithms to produce the visualization. Lichtman’s lab and Google have decided to make the map free to access for all researchers.

The sample contains 57,000 cells, approximately 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and totals 1.4 petabytes — 1.4 quadrillion bytes — worth of data. The three-dimensional scan “revealed never-before-seen structures within the human brain that may change our understanding of how our brains work,” according to a press release from Google.

In an emailed statement to The Crimson, Lichtman stated that the study revealed the larger implications strong neuron connections hold in the brain.

“These strong connections mean that a single neuron may be able to activate a target neuron on its own without the requirement of working with other axons. This saves a lot of time and may be a way learned information passes through the brain quickly (automatically) without the requirement of a lot of thinking,” Lichtman wrote.

Lichtman added that their research challenged some assumptions about the nature of the brain.

“This work shows that creating maps of the brain at the level of individual synaptic connections is possible even in human surgical samples,” Lichtman wrote. “We also detailed a few surprising findings that were different from what we expected based on what is generally described in textbooks and papers about the cerebral cortex.”

The newly-minted sciences dean is now focusing on mapping the hippocampal region of mice, which he hopes will “give us all the circuits in a mammalian brain of the first time.” This research will be far more extensive, requiring “roughly 1000x more data” than the cubic millimeter human tissue.

“I see this much like looking through the new powerful telescopes to peer into the alien world of outer space. We are doing the same thing for, if you will, innerspace, the mysterious organ that sits atop each of our shoulders,” Lichtman wrote.

—Staff writer Elizabeth Peng can be reached at elizabeth.peng@thecrimson.com.