Washington University School of Medicine researchers and
colleagues are leading a 5-year, $30 million project to map the connections in
the human brain.
(May 24, 2013) The
brain is among the most complex structures known. Each human brain contains
approximately 90 billion neurons (more than 10 times the number of people on
Earth), which transmit information across roughly 150 trillion cell-to-cell
connections known as synapses.
Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine and
the University of Minnesota are leading an unprecedented 5-year, $30 million
effort to map these complex connections. Their collaboration is known as the
Human Connectome Project (HCP).
“Our work is having a major impact on our understanding of
the healthy adult human brain,” says HCP principal investigator David Van
Essen, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington
University. “It will also enable future projects that probe what changes in
brain circuits underlie a broad variety of disorders, such as autism and
schizophrenia.”