Very intersting find. Though every time I see 'simple 3D grid' in combination with the brain, I think 'scanner or reconstruction artifact'. For my PhD research I've worked with DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging) data which was very hard to sensibly interpret as 'connectivity': The visualized structures depended very much on the parameters and reconstruction method used. And it was hard to match the visualized structures to actual physical structures.<p>I wonder if they verified in some other way (ie, microscope) that the simple 3D structures were really there. If so, very exciting news!
For a good introduction to the Connectome project, this is excellent: <a href="http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/connectome" rel="nofollow">http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/connectome</a>
The limited connectivity is very interesting -- my experience with artificial neural nets is pretty limited, but are there many well-studied ANN models that have a similar structure to this? The spatial restrictions are so simple that it seems like they'd lend themselves to efficient implementation.
Original article:<p><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1628.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1628.abstract</a> [paywall]
Someone should start a project to document all of the mechanisms in cells somewhat resembling machine phase nanotech and call it the Cellular Doohickeyome Project. (Or is it just me, but aren't there an awful lot of -omes now?)
Does anyone know the resolution of this scan? Are there many complicated structures that are smaller than this apparent grid, or are we getting close to seeing "live" images of a fully wired, working brain?
I think that we are really starting to be able to model a lot of the details of the human brain and that is very exciting.<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/23225093" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/23225093</a>