Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 28 January 2009 | Nature 457, 524-527 (2009) | doi:10.1038/457524a
News Feature
Neuroscience: Making connections
By turning neurons technicolour, Jeff Lichtman exposed the brain's wiring. Jonah Lehrer meets the 'unapologetic cell biologist' with ambitions to map every connection in the human brain.
At first glance, Jeff Lichtman seems to be hanging long strips of sticky tape from the walls of his Harvard lab. The tape flutters in the breeze from the air-conditioner.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
RE: What an excellent report of a new direction of research in neuroscience! -- Since this study will involve the sheer "quantity" and "quality" of neural connections, may I suggest the term "connectonomics" (instead of "connectomics") to be used in this area of neurological research!? Meanwhile, a new data-presentation technology -- dubbed "eigenfactor" and has been developed by the AI (artificial intelligence) cognitive scientists as recently reported in Nature by Emma Marris here: http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/01/imaging_the_eigenfactor.html -- might be useful in the eventual presentation of data in this new field of neural "connectonomics" (one which may well reveal to be a very dynamic spherical mind of "connectonomics," and/or a crucial basis for the neuronal framework and mechanism of establishing consciousness in our brain)!? Best wishes, Mong 1/30/9usct3:47p; author "Decoding Scientism" and "Consciousness & the Subconscious" (works in progress since July 2007), "Gods, Genes, Conscience" (2006: http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0595379907 ) and "Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now" (blogging avidly since 2006: http://www2.blogger.com/profile/18303146609950569778 ).
Lehrer?s report on ?Making Connections? is colorful, interesting and informative. However, quite a few statements and interpretations, ranging from philosophy to detail, seem implausible. Fundamental progress in molecular biology did not require complete genome sequencing, although it enabled it. Similarly, it seems unlikely that fundamental breakthroughs in neuroscience will require determination of complete brain connectivity. The ?connectome? is even more complex than the genome, but the key question in both cases is not ?what? but ?how? ? what are the biological principles leading to such complexity? To a large extent such principles were already established well before genomes were sequenced (by Darwin, Mendel, Fisher, Crick and others). These scientists did not ?induce? their insights from a scrutiny of complete sequences! The fundamental question in neuroscience is not what the connections are but how they are formed, and it seems likely that there are equivalent underlying principles (such as ?Hebbian? spike-pairing), which operate with an overall specificity at least equal to that underlying DNA replication (i.e. base-pairing). Lehrer quotes Lichtman as concluding that since at a neuromuscular junction strong connections can be displaced by weak inputs, the underlying mechanism is not Hebbian, but these beautiful results instead seem to address the issue of the nature of competition (post- or pre-synaptic). Colorful data can be expensive as well as beautiful, and perhaps the apparent dearth of good ideas in neuroscience to which Lichtman refers reflects the way we prioritize funding as much as it does the infertility of neuroscientists. The remarkable complexity of the brain?s connections constitutes a challenge for the new techniques profiled in the report, but above all a logical challenge ? how can extraordinarily rich and specific connections be made using synapses that are constrained by biophysics to be noisy and interdependent? Similar challenges confronted understanding the evolution of complex organisms by relatively low specificity chemical processes. Perhaps neuroscience needs not more color, but more thought.