Connections in the brain laid out like a grid of city streets, Mass. General scientists discover
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The brain is crisscrossed by neural highways that follow a simple, grid-like pattern, much like ordered city streets that intersect at right angles, according to new research by Massachusetts General Hospital scientists.
“Basically, the overall structure of the brain ends up resembling Manhattan, where you have a 2-D plan of streets and a third axis, an elevator going in the third dimension,’’ said Van Wedeen, a physicist and radiologist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Mass. General who led the study.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, used a technology called diffusion spectrum MRI that Wedeen developed to look in fine detail at the connections in the brain. Initially, he said, the human brain initially looked more like a tangle of spaghetti than ordered city streets, but as the quality of the images improved, the simple geometric patterns were revealed.
In the study, Wedeen and colleagues used the technology to investigate the brains of several species of monkeys and humans, and the same basic grid structure was seen in all of them.
Partha Mitra, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who was not involved in the research, said the effort to find the wiring diagram of the brain is important, but that the general findings of the paper are not surprising. He said he is interested in seeing a more quantitative description of the grid-like structures and validation of the findings using other techniques besides the imaging technology.
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