Key points from article :
Google helped to create connections within the human brain.
It reveals details including patterns of connections between neurons.
Freely available online brain map includes 50,000 cells, rendered in three dimensions.
Data set measures 1.4 petabytes, roughly 700 times the storage capacity of an average modern computer.
Tiny piece of brain from a 45-year-old woman with drug-resistant epilepsy was obtained.
Which was cut in to slices around 30 nanometres thick and used an electron microscope to image every slice.
The entire data is produced in a cubic millimetre, which is usually one pixel in an MRI scan.
Researchers found mysterious pairs of neurons deep in the cortex that hadn’t been observed before.
Lichtman Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology says
"... every brain will be something different from every other one".
Immediate benefit would be to explore the cell map differences in people with mental illness.
Research by Harvard University Published in Biorxiv.
