3 April 2013
Read more: “Instant Expert 31: The human brain“
Almost 2500 years since Hippocrates first saw the brain as the centre of our thoughts, we can now interrogate its inner world with some of the most advanced technology known to humanity. The ultimate aim is to work out how the brain generates our conscious mind. Such understanding is still a long way off, but we are beginning to get to grips with many previously intractable problems.
Painting the big picture
With brain-imaging techniques becoming ever more sophisticated, some neuroscientists want to draw a map of the brain’s connections. The Human Connectome Project aims to detail all the long axonal connections in the wiring of the healthy human brain, with the help of 1200 volunteers. By ...