The Mouse Connectome

With over 100 billion nodes, the human brain is perhaps the most complex network known to science. Neuroscientists call whole brain networks the »connectome«, and until recently they were unmappable. Yet given the important role the connectome plays in brain function and consciousness, Albert-László Barabási has had a long-standing interest in trying to understand its structure.

The BarabásiLab’s first attempt to visualize the structure of the brain took form as a 3D rendition of the connectome of the mouse brain. The configuration is based on data collected over the course of a multiyear project at the Allen Institute, a bioscience research center in Seattle. Whereas the one plate captures an image of the full connectome, the second plate zooms into one densely packed section – or local neighborhood – of the mouse brain’s wiring. The visualizations were created to accompany a forthcoming scientific paper.