Mapping the human brain
Brains slicing up other brains to find out more about themselves.
“Imagine the day in which thousands of neurological portraits will be available to medical doctors who will be looking for the most successful treatments. The Brain Library will match future patients living with specific neurological disease to image and data that we are collecting now.”
The Brain Library is studying base structure and trying to understand how the architecture of the brain supports our behavior, our thoughts, our memories or even our way of thinking.
Jacopo Annese heads the observatory in the University of California, San Diego, where he and his team look for connections, mapping brain structure and connecting it to human behavior.
He acquires donated brains and examines their physical characteristics such as weight, size, etc. The brain is sliced into thin sections in series, starting from the frontal tip to the back. A normal sized brain produces around 3000 slivers, each one is placed on glass, stained and digitized.
Slides can be viewed microscopically down to a resolution of less than one-half of a micron per pixel. By comparison, the period at the end of this sentence is 615 microns wide. Each digitized slice requires a terabyte of disk storage (1 trillion bytes of information). To be fully preserved digitally, an entire brain would require one petabyte of disk storage. (It would take about 160,000 DVD disks to store the same amount of data.)
After that, the images of each slice are put together by a computer to create a 3D model of the brain that can be viewed by many doctors, as opposed to sending a brain for only one doctor to study and then dispose of.
Jacopo wonders: If someone has had a pattern of behavior in their life, is that pattern of behavior reflected in the structure of the brain? Can we see it?
Annese tries to find people who knew the donor when they were alive to connect how the person was as a living human to the structure of the brain. However, finding the people who knew the donors is very difficult so Annese is trying to find people to commit to the program before they donate so they can get to know them and assess cognitive abilities and unique events in their life before analyzing the brain once they are dead.
Annesse thinks that finding the links between the brain and behavior will lead to insights to treating brain injuries or diseases. They are focusing mainly on mapping brains that have Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but healthy brains are also great to have a reference of what the structure of a person who doesn´t suffer from disease looks like and what we can do to help treat the ailments of those who do have neurological disorders.
The objective of the Digital Brain Library is to bring together scholars and professionals from diverse fields and disciplines, and in the arts and sciences. Their sought-after long-term effect is to raise awareness in society of the relation between mind and matter that occurs in every second of our lives.
