Neuroscientists from 22 labs joined forces in an unprecedented international partnership to produce a landmark achievement: a neural map that shows activity across the entire brain during decision-making, the CNN reported on Tuesday.
The data, gathered from 139 mice, encompass activity from more than 600,000 neurons in 279 areas of the brain — about 95% of the brain in a mouse. This map is the first to provide a complete picture of what happens across the brain as a decision is made.
“They have created the largest dataset anyone has ever imagined at this scale,” said Dr Paul W Glimcher, chair of the department of neuroscience and physiology and director of the Neuroscience Institute at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, of the researchers.
In the field of neuroscience, “this is going to go down in history as a major event,” Glimcher, who was not involved in the new research, told CNN.
To construct the map, researchers first created a standardized procedure to be shared across laboratories and then tracked neural activity in mice as the rodents responded to visual prompts, integrating all the data gathered by each lab. Seven years in the making and presented in two studies, the findings were published on September 3 in the journal Nature.