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Mouse brain research is helping us better understand human minds

Composite image of items like a ladder, lightbulb, book and hand holding a brain, in a white spotlight against a gray background

Researchers built a 3D image of nearly every neuron and their connections within a small piece of human brain tissue. The top image shows excitatory neurons and the bottom image shows inhibitory neurons.

The top image shows all the excitatory neurons in a piece of human brain tissue lit up in yellow, while the bottom image shows all the inhibitory neurons in the same sample lit up in blue.

Connectomics across the decades.

A diagram showing a table of different connectomics projects, with a roundworm at the top with 302 neurons requiring terabytes of storage, accomplished in the 1970s. The table grows in scale as it goes down to fruit fly, human brain fragments, mouse hippocampus, mouse and finally a whole human brain. The human brain,the number of neurons has dramatically increased to 100,000,000,000, which would need hundreds of exabytes to store.

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