Neuronaurants from the area The world was the first to work parallel to the map of the entire mouse brain activity while making decisions. This achievement included the operate of electrodes inserted into the brain to simultaneously record the activity of over half a million neurons spread over 95 percent of the rodent brain volume.
Thanks to the obtained picture, scientists were able to confirm the theoretical architecture of thoughts: that there is no single region only responsible for making decisions, and instead it is a coordinated process between many areas of the brain.
To illuminate all regions involved in this decision -making process, the team has trained mice to turn the petite steering wheel to move the wheels on the screen. If the shape moved correctly towards the center, the animal received sugar water as a prize.
After conducting this experiment with 139 mice in 12 laboratories and monitoring their brain activity, the experiment managed to map 620,000 neurons located in 279 brain areas, with a subset of 75,000 well -insulated neurons. The resolution of the produced neural map is unprecedented in the brain and its neural network during the thinking process. In addition, it represents a milestone in terms of the observed type of sample and the range covered by the area of the brain. Until now, only the entire fruit flies, fish larvae or petite sections of more intricate brains have been touched.
Decision making is a holistic process
The results were published in two Identity documents In the journal Nature. Although scientists have been involved that the data is not final, they are the starting point in the neural examination of decision making. The value of this data consists in the fact that the neural decision making path is now clearer, which will allow scientists to better understand the intricate thinking abilities and conduct more advanced analyzes. In addition, the data set is publicly available.
“These initial conclusions confirm the aspects of the brain function, which were already intuitive from the more limited available research. It is as if we suspected how the film would end without seeing the ending; now they showed us it”, Juan Lerma, a research professor at the Spanish Council for National Research, Said science media center of Spain. (Lerma was not involved in research.) “In short, the data show that, for example, in making decisions in many areas of the brain it is more than expected, while in sensory processing areas are more separate.”
An adult human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, each of which can establish thousands of synaptic connections with other cells. Although it weighs about 1.4 kilograms, the human brain consumes about 20 percent of the total body energy at rest, which is an extremely high percentage for its size. Although today’s supercomputers exceed the brain in numerical calculations, none of them suits its energy efficiency or the ability to learn, adapt and parallel processing. There is still a long way before neuronauka can fully map the neural decision -making processes by people, but studies like this approach us a step.
This article was originally published on Wired in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.