“ There is no point in asking for the impossible, such as, for example, the exact electrical pattern of a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and how all its neurons fire.", wrote in 1979 Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Yet this is precisely what the 154 scientists of the MICrONS Project achieved by combining millions of electron microscopy images of the mouse visual cortex with data on the activation of each neuron while the animal watched a video. Nine publications on this work have appeared in the journal Nature.
On screen, strapped to a chair, Morpheus—played by actor Laurence Fishburne—slowly raises his head toward Agent Smith. Without transition, a tracking shot along a forest path evokes the perspective of a walker in fast motion. The clips follow one another by the dozen, alternating between nature walks and film scenes or sports competitions. Against this succession of disparate images, a mouse runs on a treadmill, its head fixed under a microscope. Genetically modified, its neurons emit a light signal when they activate, allowing researchers to use two-photon microscopy to track the activation of each of the 70,000 neurons in its visual cortex.
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