Play EyeWire and shine light on one of today’s greatest mysteries: the connectome.
Help recruit EyeWirers to map the retinal connectome by sharing this fun one minute trailer video. Also check out this video for a detailed description from Sebastian Seung.
We’ve landed on the moon, can grow organs and even skydive from space, yet when it comes to understanding the brain, scientists are mostly in the dark. EyeWire is a citizen science game that will radically increase the rate at which neuroscientists discover neural connections and subsequently begin to understand how neurons collectively function, yielding higher level cognition such as visual perception.
Map the 3D structure of neurons by playing EyeWire and become a part of Seung Lab at MIT.
A connectome is a wiring diagram of the connectivity of neurons in a brain. Your connectome contains a million times more connections than your genome has letters. Finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of all time. At the present time, researchers are working on a more modest challenge: mapping connectomes in small chunks of brain. This still involves numerous technical barriers, yet is expected to be soluble in the near future. Such technological progress will enable EyeWire to tackle its scientific goals: to find the connectional basis of J cells, a type of neuron in the retina responsible for the perception of upward motion.
Get involved. Play EyeWire. Let us know what you think at suport at eyewire dot org.
Have questions? We’ve got answers. Ask on the EyeWire Forum and a member of the Seung Lab may video reply.