Google and Harvard release interactive 3D map of human brain section in never-seen-before detail

There’s a short writeup on Google’s AI blog about some groundbreaking work done to progress the mapping of the human brain – and the numbers are hard to wrap one’s head around (pun intended).

The researchers took 1 cubic millimetre of brain tissue from the cerebral cortex (the crinkly part I believe), sliced it into about 5300 layers, took 225 million ‘pictures’ with a scanning electron microscopic and from this created a 1.4 petabyte ( 1.4 million Gigabytes 🤪) dataset that they’ve made available – then with an eye-watering amount of computational processing have generated a detailed 3D reconstruction of the few tens of thousands of neurons and 130 million synapses involved – that you can interact with using your web browser!! And all of this work represents about only 1 millionth of the entire human brain …

But when you consider one of the earlier articles on the portal – it took mankind about 13 years and $5 billion dollars to map the human genome, and yet just over a decade later you can buy a portable DNA sequencer that connects to your laptop for under $100. So it may not be the many decades currently being estimated to create a full model of the human brain …

Holy. Cow. The power of exponential improvements, and the amazing times we live in!!