The Human Brain Project has ambitions to advance brain research, cognitive neuroscience and other brain-inspired sciences like few other projects before it. Created in 2013 by the European Commission, the project’s aims include gathering, organizing and disseminating data describing the brain and its diseases, and simulating the brain itself. To do so, they’re going to need a good map. That’s because the human brain, with about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections, is one of the most complex systems known to man.
To map something so complicated, scientists at the Jülich Research Center (Forschungszentrum Jülich), in Germany, are developing a 3D multi-modal model of the human brain. They do this by analyzing thousands of ultrathin histological brain slices using microscopes and advanced image analysis methods — and then reconstructing these slices into a 3D computer model.
