Wire Me Up

Everything you know – from the features of a loved one's face to fascinating facts – is encoded somewhere in the complex connections between your brain cells. But we have very little idea exactly how it works. Thanks to advances in imaging and computing, researchers are now starting to map out this tangled biological wiring, known as the connectome. This image is a three-dimensional representation of the nerve cell connections in a human brain, assembled from a special type of scan that traces the movement of water along the long tails of nerve cells as they weave together. The amount of data needed to make these kinds of images is huge, taking around ten hours for a computer to assemble a 3D image. But as these mind maps become faster to make and more data becomes available, scientists can finally begin to unravel the mystery of how we make memories.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by David Liewald and Mark Bastin
• University of Edinburgh
• Copyright owned by David Liewald