Scientists have recently drafted an incredibly detailed map of the human brain
Originally published by Cassandra Willyard on October 12, 2023 C olor lithograph of the rear cross-section of a brain and spine superimposed on an old map. Stephanie Arnett/MITTR | Wellcome Collection This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. A massive suite of papers offers a high-res view of the human and non-human primate brain. When scientists first looked at brain tissue under a microscop e, they saw an impenetrable and jumbled mess. Santiago Ramon y Cajal , the father of modern neuroscience , likened the experience to walking into a forest with a hundred billion trees , “looking each day at blurry pieces of a few of those trees entangled with one another, and, after a few years of this, trying to write an illustrated field guide to the fore st,” according to the authors of The Beautiful Brain , a book about Cajal’s work. Today, scientists have a first draft of that guide . In a set of 21 new papers published acr