Mapping The Brain Synapse By Synapse To Explore The Mind with Jeff Lichtman

A superstar of neuroscience Jeff Lichtman will take us on a tour through the brain, the mind, and every single connection that your neurons make. Can we have a complete map of the brain all its connections? And what would it tell us about our own minds?
What does the human brain actually looks like? What is special about the human brain? How do human brains store information? What is connectomics, and why do we do it? What is the relationship between information and understanding?
Human brains are unusual given that most of our behaviours are learned. In what form this learned knowledge is stored is not known. To learn how and where our experiences are stored, Jeff Lichtman has been developing new techniques with the aim of seeing the brain as completely as possible – that is to the level of every single synapse that connects every single nerve cell. We use modern very high-resolution imaging techniques with a good deal of aid from computer scientists at Google to map the wiring diagram that connects nerve cells to each other at synapses. I will describe our studies where we have looked at a few data sets where we have mapped all the connections between nerve cells. As with the development of any new method to apprehend a previously unseen world, the results show many unexpected things.
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